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Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

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Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

The answer to 1) is no - MW doesn’t make those decisions. Show me a law that says that companies must fire poor people or otherwise marginalize them!

You answered a different question than I asked. I didn't ask "does the MW require them to be fired?" I asked "does the MW hurt them?" IE are their conditions better or worse after the MW is raised?

Can you answer that?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

The answer to 2) is that I’m not clear where you get the breakdowns for these numbers and even if they’re applicable outside of the specific study you got them from. It’s also distracting, I concede that you have disputed studies to back your case.

This isn't quite correct. I don't have a couple of disputed studies. I have 85% of all studies and 90% of all labor economists supporting the numbers I've offered here to create the table.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Your suggestion to roll things back does nothing to fix the reason for MW.

That is correct...and irrelevant. This is like arguing that my decision to not stab a person does nothing to fix their cancer. Sure, so what? The question is, are they better off, in total, in a situation where they've been stabbed or in a situation where they are not?

To be utterly pedantic about this to avoid the expected rebuttal, which situation is better given the data:

a) Per month, per 100 people, there were $704,000 wages paid and $80,000 in benefits paid.

b) Per month, per 100 people, they were $675,385 wages paid and $117,135 in benefits paid.

A or B Sharmak?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

So you’re saying that MW *only* benefits those families that don’t really need the job in the first place...

No. I'm saying that group of people who get a wage boost in the table are over represented by people from middle class families. IE that people from middle class families are more likely than people from low income families to get the increased wage or to keep their job.

I'm sure you realize your small sliver of observations isn't a good scientific sample right? Why don't we stick with the peer-reviewed work of actual scientists;

Blacks suffer the most (-2.8%) and especially black teenagers (-8.4%)...

I would specifically point you to table 5 on page 28...In turn, you'll notice that older, non-minority groups have a positive elasticity, meaning they do get jobs when the minimum wage increases.

Specifically, the vast majority of minimum wage earners are not sole income providers (meaning they live with someone who also makes a wage). And two thirds of those people live in a household with 2-3 times the federal poverty limit (if we include anyone more than two times the poverty limit it is even higher). So the vast majority of minimum wage earners affected by the increased wages will come from non-poor households. What is another characteristic associated with those households? Higher skill levels. IE the kid from an upper middle class family has a higher skill level than the same kid coming from an urban ghetto or poverty line family.

A company needs to hire a minimum number of people to operate efficiently so increasing MW just makes it more expensive to maintain their hires... And what is “additional excess supply”’anyway?

Or it can substitute those workers with machines, or go out of business, or stop offering the service or product those workers create, right? All of which would cause job losses.

"Additional excess supply" are the people who lose their job when you increase the minimum wage.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

In the cases I have shown, it was explicitly stated that over supply caused lower wages.

Huh? I think you might be imagining that. Can you point out a single source I've offered that has said that was the starting condition? If not, could you retract that claim?

And, to help you step out of this error, I'll offer a hint: wages are determined by the marginal contribution of the job. IE, the upper limit an employer would rationally pay an employee is the amount of revenue they contribute to the company right? Any number above that would force bankruptcy, right?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

But there are also people who dispute your case and they hold more sway for some reason.

There are a tiny minority who say that there is no observable effect (ie the effect is too small to measure). No economist that I can find says that it has no effect. And perhaps the reason they hold more sway for you is that they confirming your opinion before entering the thread?

If I pointed out that 85% of climate scientists agreed that man was causing a majority of observed warming, would you find that number persuasive? I think you would (given that you've made that argument in the past). Thus this isn't about data or studies, or consensus, its about cognitive dissonance.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Your lack of an alternative solution and your lack of admission that people ought to have low wages speaks volumes. You keep side stepping these questions and I wonder why?

Let's try an analogy to clarify this issue. You go to the doctor tomorrow and he says, "Sharmak, you have an extremely high cholesterol level that puts you at risk of a heart attack."

You ask him what can be done.

He reponds, "I'd like to prescribe e-coli. Now, 85% of studies and 90% of doctors say the e-coli will make you incredibly sick. The rest haven't shown that it will or weren't sure."

You gasp, "how many found it would help?"

"Oh, none, at least none that were able to get published in a journal."

Sharmak: "I don't know doc, this doesn't sound like a good idea, I think I might not take the e-coli."

He throws down his clipboard in frustration, "Look, you haven't addressed why not taking the e-coli would make your cholesterol better, are you crazy!"

If I were to offer a course of treatment that wasn't shown to make your illness better and was usually shown to make it worse, wouldn't not taking it be a sufficient deduction? Why would I then need to propose an anti-lipid treatment to rule out taking e-coli in the above scenario?

Unrelated to my response to Sharmak above, a new working paper by Neumark and Shupe has been released that has some very interesting findings.

From the abstract (emphasis mine):

We explore the decline in teen employment in the United States since 2000, which was sharpest for those age 16–17. We consider three explanatory factors: a rising minimum wage that could reduce employment opportunities for teens and potentially increase the value of investing in schooling; rising returns to schooling; and increasing competition from immigrants that, like the minimum
wage, could reduce employment opportunities and raise the returns to human capital investment. We find that higher minimum wages are the predominant factor explaining changes in the schooling and workforce behavior of those age 16–17 since 2000. We also consider implications for human capital. Higher minimum wages have led both to fewer teens in school and employed at the same time, and to more teens in school but not employed, which is potentially consistent with a greater focus on schooling. We find no evidence that higher minimum wages have led to greater human capital investment. If anything, the evidence points to adverse effects on longer-run earnings for those exposed to these higher minimum wages as teenagers.

Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Introduction

I fear we may be going around in circles a bit. There's really nothing more than you can say to persuade me that:

1. Free market economics works. Certainly every government doesn't think so, which is why every one of your arguments fail.
2. Doing nothing and leaving things as they are, as you're suggesting, is a good thing. Which is another reason why every one of your arguments fail - your alternative is unacceptable.
3. That your studies are anything more than helping to promote bad economics that no-one (other than other cultists) have paid attention to, and for decades mind. Understanding your failures to persuade the very people that can affect change speaks volumes (as does your calling of government interference “artificial”).
4. That the studies reflect the full picture: they are simply looking at the surface effects without understanding why. Which again, is why no-one pays them any attention - they’re not that helpful other than prompting further studies.
5. Any of your analogies aren't just merely an insight into how narrow and blinkered your view point is: they don't look at the full picture and don't try to understand the whys.

You appear to think that these points are irrelevant but they're wholly relevant because you're promoting no-MW as a 'solution' and free market ideas as being the right way to go and that no ‘artificial’ interference should be allowed. None of your ideas are useful in solving problems and they require an alternative world, one that has no 'artificial' effects from government or unions or any kind of organizing beyond the individual. No-one takes seriously and I fear that you may be confusing modeling convenience and academic simplicity from your Economics 101 class for solutions in a very complicated world; most of whom only care about themselves. Your argument is literally for a world that governments should not do anything to affect the economy from working naturally: it is little wonder governments ignore your viewpoints.

Even if your thesis that "Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts the most vulnerable in our society" may be true (in some limited scenarios), you ignore that it actually helps some of them and more of them than otherwise would have happened (see below). You have only demonstrated the obvious point that employers choose how they respond to market changes without explaining why. Without understanding the full picture, you are ending up advocating to do nothing or to roll back MW, the only lever that governments can implement easily. Most people like to move forward; you want to move back without offering an alternative path. So on top of being ignored, you’re offering a weak plan of action that is tantamount to doing nothing.

If you can't offer realistic solutions that can be applied in the real world with real problems with real pay disparities of companies that have to be supported by the taxpayer then you must concede this argument. Your studies, as minimal as they are, are not useful and your world view is not implementable and your studies are ignored across the globe and throughout recent history. I'm still wondering what the point of your post actually is other than pointing out the obvious points that employers are usually only out for themselves (as they should)!

MW is harmful and math!

You answered a different question than I asked. I didn't ask "does the MW require them to be fired?" I asked "does the MW hurt them?" IE are their conditions better or worse after the MW is raised? Can you answer that?

And I have to answer again, no: MW helps them directly and employers choose from a wide range of responses to that legislation. If they choose to hurt their own existing employees that is on them. MW just sets up new free market conditions and it is each employers responsibility to determine their own best path.

This isn't quite correct. I don't have a couple of disputed studies. I have 85% of all studies and 90% of all labor economists supporting the numbers I've offered here to create the table.

Let's put the table aside for the moment since the provenance of the numbers, how you're putting together the different papers are still under question (by at least 10% of economists and 15% of other studies). But it’s essentially irrelevant unfortunately because despite all the evidence you put forward, the crux of your argument, to rid ourselves of MW and not use it to solve existing pay disparities, has no support in the real world. After a few decades of studies to produce zero results is hardly the best endorsement of your view point. So either you don't understand the big picture or refuse to; and if the latter, how exactly are you going to implement it and persuade the world governments that the free market “knows best”?

SharmaK:Your suggestion to roll things back does nothing to fix the reason for MW.

That is correct...and irrelevant.

It's entirely relevant. You're literally saying do nothing and literally saying you have no alternative solution. Further, you are suggesting that the argument ends with the studies you have already forwarded: that it's enough to know that because some employers choose to fire or reduce the hours and mainly keep the white people happy, these are reasons enough to not consider MW as a solution to low wages that have to be supplemented by the taxpayer.

This is the kind of argument which looks extremely one sided; it is deliberately blinding oneself and taking the first initial negative result and then stopping because it supports one's own personal world view of free market economics with no "external" or "artificial" interference. Not only that but your studies seem American-focused and therefore, not really applicable in all situations around the world and they don't try to understand the reasons for the responses from employers. I personally think that more studies need to be done before we do away with MW altogether. Your surface presentation of the problem is insufficient to justify not applying the easiest lever that the government has to resolve the issue.

The only thing irrelevant, are

1. your studies since they're not generally applicable anyway (or at least you haven't demonstrated that)
2. your free market view of the world, since, well, they actually are irrelevant to decisions made by most governments - international or local - in solving wage issues.
3. your solutions to the problem since, frankly, you have none.

Until these change, it doesn't matter what your argument is, they have already failed by being ignored by people whose mission is actually to help low income workers. I suggest you concede your thesis as irrelevant to our readers as it is to the rest of the world!

This is like arguing that my decision to not stab a person does nothing to fix their cancer. Sure, so what? The question is, are they better off, in total, in a situation where they've been stabbed or in a situation where they are not?

Sure, with your Chicken Little approach. But the reality is that sometimes you have to stab them (carefully of course) in order to remove cancerous growths.

Even here your analogy reveals a blinkered tunnel vision understanding of all the possible scenarios; using a seemingly bad action (cutting/MW) to mask that something good might be done (excising cancer/paying people more money) because there may be no other choice (cancer needs to be removed to prevent harm/forcing employers to pay fair wages is the simplest legislative action).

To turn your own scenario directly against you, you are suggesting that nothing should be done and that the free market requires unfettered interruption of the cancer’s growth. The “artificial” actions of surgery should not be allowed and the patient has all the power he needs to defeat the disease himself with no external help. In other words, my way provides solutions (even though sometimes people die in surgery) and yours does nothing to help.

To be utterly pedantic about this to avoid the expected rebuttal, which situation is better given the data:a) Per month, per 100 people, there were $704,000 wages paid and $80,000 in benefits paid.b) Per month, per 100 people, they were $675,385 wages paid and $117,135 in benefits paid.A or B Sharmak?

Again, this is an incomplete scenario. Since you're actually offering zero MW, then it's possible that it could be $100,000 wages paid and $800,000 of benefits paid. So I think your scenario is could actually be choosing between two bad scenarios whilst possibly hiding an even worse scenario.

Your table is definitely incomplete per your own scenarios - so what are the inflation-adjusted numbers WITHOUT MW? Let’s see what your actual solution really holds. Please accept this as a formal challenge or never discuss this table again.

So on top of not really supporting numbers that you admit are disputed (and likely by economists who see the larger picture), you certainly haven't supported your very general OP that ALL MW in the entire world in every economic scenario is a bad thing (which should be obvious given your numbers). In fact, I'd like you point out the 15% of studies by 10% economists so that we can read what they have to say.

I have serious problems with all your following responses that you have narrowed the discussion to only your side of the argument and only your solution (which is to do nothing). We will address these problems next.

MW helps some LIF but MIF are better off

No. I'm saying that group of people who get a wage boost in the table are over represented by people from middle class families. IE that people from middle class families are more likely than people from low income families to get the increased wage or to keep their job.

Remember the point that you keep avoiding, is that it is the employers making 100% of these decisions. Such disparities, which are inherent in the limited society of your study (i.e. not globally applicable) may well be exacerbated by MW, such that when push comes to the shove, low income families are going to made to suffer by their employers more than middle income families. But that's reality that MW has no control over and to not do something because not everyone can be helped is frankly ridiculous.

Your argument here appears to be that those LIF will only get paid at all if there were no minimum wage. But this salary would be lower than the MW (since by your argument, a high salary doesn't get paid to LIF). In which case, without MW, all LIF would end up worse off, rather than at least some of them might do better. So your scenario actually supports MW because at least some LIF are being helped (even though it helps MIF more).

That MIF do better than LIF is hardly a surprise anyway, for the reasons you have already pointed out. So it's a red herring that just because MIF would do better than LIF under MW, we shouldn't do it. It literally makes no sense!

In summary, you're admitting here that at least some LIF are better off.

MW forces businesses to operate more efficiently

Or it can substitute those workers with machines, or go out of business, or stop offering the service or product those workers create, right? All of which would cause job losses.

"Additional excess supply" are the people who lose their job when you increase the minimum wage.

Again, I have to point out that it is businesses that make these decisions:
1. If they choose automation, then that's good anyway. Don’t forget such machines take a great deal of lead-up time so it's not as if the companies aren't already considering and preparing for this avenue anyway. If MW ends up accelerating their already existing plans and machinery then it's clear that it was only a matter of time anyway.
2. If they go out of business, then they are literally being propped up by the taxpayer. Good riddance.
3. If they stop offering their service or product then that too is obviously a bad service or product that survives only by taxpayers supplementing their businesses. Again, good riddance.

And those lost jobs are hardly secure positions to begin with; nor really ones essential to the business, if they are so easily shed.

MW forces employers to pay a fair wage

SharmaK: In the cases I have shown, it was explicitly stated that over supply caused lower wages.

Huh? I think you might be imagining that. Can you point out a single source I've offered that has said that was the starting condition? If not, could you retract that claim?

And, to help you step out of this error, I'll offer a hint: wages are determined by the marginal contribution of the job. IE, the upper limit an employer would rationally pay an employee is the amount of revenue they contribute to the company right? Any number above that would force bankruptcy, right?

In the cases of migrant workers, the Singapore scenario, and any other low skill job - there is already an oversupply and employers are taking advantage of it. Employers of course take into account what each role contributes but assuming it is 'rational' does not mean that it is 'fair' is a stretch. And by fair, I also mean that the taxpayers shouldn't have to supplement their full time income.

I see no problems with employees getting together, unionizing or having the government step in to change the employer’s perception of a job’s contribution and put a floor on that value.

Employers will pay as little as they possibly can get away with since that too is a rational, indeed the most rational, response to salaries and that's were the disparity of power comes in. With employees easily replaced and with little power individually, employers have an unfair advantage. MW is merely the government stepping in and saying rather than the taxpayer support your business, how about employers support their own business? Unions have been successful in getting better wages and better working conditions too.

Your point that this forces a bankruptcy makes zero sense in general: no one is saying that MW should suck out all the profits of the company. And other than some small businesses, which are operating on tiny profit margins any, your point is overstated and doesn’t apply to multinational chains. You need to stop exaggerating or over applying some small corner cases (where businesses are close to failure anyway) and applying it every scenario. It's why I can't take your arguments seriously - I have to make sure you’re not slipping in some fake facts to support your already poorly accepted solutions.

Why do all governments ignore economists on this issue?

There are a tiny minority who say that there is no observable effect (ie the effect is too small to measure). No economist that I can find says that it has no effect. And perhaps the reason they hold more sway for you is that they confirming your opinion before entering the thread?

Perhaps but on the flip side, even though you have the majority of the studies supporting your point of view, no actual government really follows your recommendations of doing nothing. You offer no alternatives to MW, and indeed, are suggesting that the low wages are an acceptable reality. You also ignore that MW is fixing a reality that is already the free market; it’s a little weird to offer as a solution, the same thing that got us into the mess in the first place.

If you're suggesting there should no MW and no government interference nor unions and that things should be left alone, then you're not really part of the solution, nor helping. You’re literally part of the problem because you’re suggesting to leave poor wages as they are (as well as getting rid of MW and Unions!)

The arguments that vulnerable people are being hurt by MW is merely a front to allow the free market to continue paying those same people low salaries, i.e. the condition that caused MW in the first place. So the entire point of your thread is specious and dishonest.

So not only are you telling the people whose job it is to represent the people, not to do their one job, but also that that we should continue spending taxpayer money to prop up businesses that cause the problem of low wages in the first place. If you want to talk about who holds more sway, it is certainly not economists but the actual governments that they despise.

If I pointed out that 85% of climate scientists agreed that man was causing a majority of observed warming, would you find that number persuasive? I think you would (given that you've made that argument in the past). Thus this isn't about data or studies, or consensus, its about cognitive dissonance.

On global warming, many governments and indeed nearly all of them recognize that even if man isn't the cause, we can produce legislation, world wide agreements and programs that would slow down its effects.

It is even at the stage where pro-fossil-fuel governments, such as the USA now, have to impose tarrifs on more efficient and more profitable technologies such as solar, in order to help their friends. These actions aren't even about being anti-global-warming but more about supporting an industry that should be dying.

In short, GW holds a lot of sway based on science and your MW holds zero sway because it is basically saying people should be paid poorly. Your responses thus far have confirmed my suspicions that free-market economists have no leg to stand on: they don't like government interference or any kind of collective bargaining because they want to keep their model of the world simple and simplified. The world, which is complex and complicated and contradictory disagrees. It's why you have lost the argument: you offer literally nothing to help the situation.

The only cognitive dissonance is your own in that you're trying to 'help' the poor by saying their low salaries are an expected outcome of free market economies and that any 'artificial' interference between the single mother and the factory they work for is the cause of their woes. That fact is, that you don't have solutions to the problem and that you don't see that there is a problem at all, and ideally, that there should be no unions and no governments and things will work out. Your entire post is a contradiction: pretending to be helpful by pointing out that MW doesn't help at the same time holding that low wages are the way things 'should' be anyway.

Another Bad Analogy To Deal With And Why Free Market Economists are really a pushing a religion

Let's try an analogy to clarify this issue. You go to the doctor tomorrow and he says, "Sharmak, you have an extremely high cholesterol level that puts you at risk of a heart attack."

You ask him what can be done.

He reponds, "I'd like to prescribe e-coli. Now, 85% of studies and 90% of doctors say the e-coli will make you incredibly sick. The rest haven't shown that it will or weren't sure."

You gasp, "how many found it would help?"

"Oh, none, at least none that were able to get published in a journal."

Sharmak: "I don't know doc, this doesn't sound like a good idea, I think I might not take the e-coli."

He throws down his clipboard in frustration, "Look, you haven't addressed why not taking the e-coli would make your cholesterol better, are you crazy!"

If I were to offer a course of treatment that wasn't shown to make your illness better and was usually shown to make it worse, wouldn't not taking it be a sufficient deduction? Why would I then need to propose an anti-lipid treatment to rule out taking e-coli in the above scenario?

This scenario is simple. Again, your blinkered and highly narrowly focused and limited and biased scenarios offer a wholly unrealistic view of the world that offers scenarios are over applied (much like all of your limited studies that have had zero legislative support around the world under many scenarios).

In this case, there are better solutions than pills and medicine: it's simply to change one's diet and exercise more. There's no need to for e-coli or any other solution. And that is all I have asked of you: what is your alternative? You don't offer one, instead you say, do nothing! Your extremely high cholesterol is a natural consequence of your life style and is to be expected and no 'artificial' remedies should be applied so that 'nature' can take its course. That’s clearly not a “solution” but being OK with high cholesterol!

You may well be pointing out that e-coli has bad side effects, as does MW, but rather than figuring out if the e-coli's side effect could be mitigated or even to try to understand why e-coli is bad, your you're literally saying, do nothing because your high cholesterol is expected and warranted and deserved. And that’s assuming that e-coil is the best approach anyway, which by your own account it isn’t so I don’t even understand the reason why you bring it up. MW remains the best tool and the side effects just have to be mitigated through some other means.

Besides, you're confusing hard science in the e-coli case, as if your studies are hard-science. Your free-market view point isn't really science, it is at best a limited study of a narrow view of how the world should be that has little effect on the actual world because it offers no solutions that are applicable or any solutions at all frankly.

It's basically bad politics with basic math. At worse, it is a religion that requires no government interference, nor collective bargaining and refuses to fix bad situations because of some unsupported notion that doing nothing is better than doing something.

The sooner you admit that your solutions will never be implemented the better!

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

3. That your studies are anything more than helping to promote bad economics that no-one (other than other cultists) have paid attention to, and for decades mind. Understanding your failures to persuade the very people that can affect change speaks volumes (as does your calling of government interference “artificial”).

Of the five points, this is the only one that related to the thread. So when you say "no-one" you mean no-one aside from the 90% of economists that agree with the stated position, as supported in the OP?

Your position seems to rest on the decisions and beliefs of non-economists. IE an anti-science position. Do you accept the consensus of 90% of scientists polled and 85% of peer-reviewed work, or do you accept the position of people with no training in the area?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Your argument is literally for a world that governments should not do anything to affect the economy from working naturally: it is little wonder governments ignore your viewpoints.

I don't disagree, why would we expect a government to endorse a position that decreases its own power?

Can you show where, in this thread I've made an anarcho-capitalist argument? (It would be a surprise to me since I'm not an anarcho-capitalist). Plese support or retract that this is my argument.

Hint: The actual argument in this thread is: "the minimum wage has, when all factors are considered, a negative impact on those it is targeted at helping. It specifically has a disproportionately large negative impact (again, all other factors incorporated) on the poor and minorities."

Originally Posted by Sharmak

And I have to answer again, no: MW helps them directly

You evaded the question for obvious reasons, but it isn't that easy.

Question: At six months post MW enactment, which word describes poor people's monthly take home pay:

More

Less

Originally Posted by Sharmak

MW just sets up new free market conditions and it is each employers responsibility to determine their own best path.

This is up there for one of the most bizarre sentences I've read here. Can you support (or retract) that a market that has a price floor (such as a minimum wage) is a "free market."

Originally Posted by Sharmak

But it’s essentially irrelevant unfortunately because despite all the evidence you put forward, the crux of your argument, to rid ourselves of MW and not use it to solve existing pay disparities, has no support in the real world. After a few decades of studies to produce zero results is hardly the best endorsement of your view point.

You misunderstand the evidence presented. Again, 85% of all studies and 90% of economists agree that the data of the real world shows that people are better off when you don't impose a minimum wage.

All of those studies (well over two hundred in this thread alone) are reflecting data from the real world Sharmak. They aren't just blackboard theories, they are showing the impact of actual minimum wage increases on actual people.

And, to be perfectly pedantic, because you seem to have a habit here of ignoring the obvious: 85% of all peer reviewed studies, and 90% of all economists agree that people are better off when you don't impose a minimum wage.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

It's entirely relevant. You're literally saying do nothing and literally saying you have no alternative solution.

Support or retract where I've said either of these statements.

Again, the thread's premise and scope is solely about the relatively undisputed fact that, "he minimum wage has, when all factors are considered, a negative impact on those it is targeted at helping. It specifically has a disproportionately large negative impact (again, all other factors incorporated) on the poor and minorities."

Originally Posted by Sharmak

1. your studies since they're not generally applicable anyway

Please support or retract that the studies presented in this thread are not applicable to the labor market.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

To turn your own scenario directly against you, you are suggesting that nothing should be done and that the free market requires unfettered interruption of the cancer’s growth.

Again, to reiterate, Please support or retract that I have said that.

What I'm asking is, if we presume someone has cancer, do we adopt a procedure that 85% of medical studies and 90% of doctors agree will make it worse (And the remaining 15/10% say won't have any effect at all)?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Your table is definitely incomplete per your own scenarios - so what are the inflation-adjusted numbers WITHOUT MW? Let’s see what your actual solution really holds. Please accept this as a formal challenge or never discuss this table again.

You'll have to explain your bizarre need for this in inflation adjusted terms. Since we aren't talking about wages over a period of time, but in two different scenarios, there isn't an inflation adjustment required. I really don't mean to be a jerk about this, but you've added a term to your scenario that is meaningless to make it sound like you understand economics. Unless you can support why an inflation adjustment would apply across two scenarios that happen at the same time (or even how it would be possible to do an inflation adjustment) is necessary, please retract that as part of your request.

As for the scenarios. I want to be perfectly clear that there is no need for me to "support" anything based on your request for additional criteria. If you feel a formal challenge still applies, please open up a thread in ask the staff for Mican to adjudicate. Improper use of formal challenges to goad an opponent into supporting a position they have not held is generally considered trolling. So please respond to this section with either an ask the staff thread or a retraction of your challenge.

At that point, I'm happy to discuss what changes and updates you would like to see included in the table. I've literally been asking for you to define what you think has been left out for several pages now.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

may well be exacerbated by MW, such that when push comes to the shove, low income families are going to made to suffer by their employers more than middle income families. But that's reality

Yes, it is a reality that they have to live with Sharmak. You can simply ignore it in your quest for social progress, but they cannot. There is no "may" about it. There are hundreds of studies and volumes of data showing that they are, in fact, hurt by the MW enactment. You can blame employers, or systematic racism, or whatever other boogeyman you would like to assuage your feeling of guilt, but there is no rationalization that you've offered here that changes this simple fact; "in a world with a higher MW, more lower income families are in multi-generational poverty than in a world without that higher MW."

Originally Posted by Sharmak

MW forces businesses to operate more efficiently

You stated earlier that businesses are unrepetently greedy, right?

So if those businesses could have operated more efficiently (which is what you are arguing) they would have gotten more profits (the definition of efficiency), right?

So why didn't they do that without the minimum wage?

Are they so dumb that they didn't understand their own business, but you, Sharmak, do?

Or were they not greedy until you enacted the minium wage?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Employers will pay as little as they possibly can get away with

I've now offered a half dozen studies showing that employers have to accept market wages, but to no avail. Now it is your turn. Support or retract that employers have monopsony power in the US.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

On global warming, many governments and indeed nearly all of them recognize that even if man isn't the cause, we can produce legislation, world wide agreements and programs that would slow down its effects.

And you realize that that is an appeal to authority fallacy right? Or are you seriously arguing that politicians know more than scientists on these issues?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

MW holds zero sway because it is basically saying people should be paid poorly.

You do realize that the science says the exact opposite of this right? That MW ensures they are paid more poorly?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

In this case, there are better solutions than pills and medicine: it's simply to change one's diet and exercise more.

Fair enough, I agree that there are other solutions. What I'm asking you, to deal with the actual thread at hand is the question here. Answer the question Sharmak;

If I were to offer a course of treatment that 85% of medical journals and 90% of doctors said would make your illness worse (and the remaining said would have no effect) would you adopt that treatment or would you say "no, lets look for something else?"

"Suffering lies not with inequality, but with dependence." -Voltaire

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” -G.K. Chesterton

Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Squatch347

Of the five points, this is the only one that related to the thread.

All the points are related to this thread. Just because you have a narrowly defined argument, it doesn’t mean it isn’t incomplete and it doesn’t make it useful and it most certainly doesn’t make it believable.

You have made some bold claims that continue to be ignored by the world at large and you’re promoting an unrealistic world view and recommending to do nothing about the low income issue. Practically everything you have put forward is irrelevant to solving the problem: your evidence is useless other than to point out that employers are making bad decisions but you don’t know why; your free market world view requires no government/union involvement in wage setting, which kinda defeats the purpose of a government or a union; and your ideas are resoundingly ignored by practically everyone that isn’t in the field.

The uselessness of your argument can’t be overstated.

Your constant failure to promote your world view of a ‘free market’ here mirrors that of the real world. You keep forgetting that it is the ‘free market’, incorrectly (IMHO) defined as absence government assistance or unions, is where we started. But your limited OP deliberately ignores that fact and that’s what makes your OP practically worthless.

MW is a reaction against the free market. So going back to not doing anything or reducing MW, are not solutions that make sense: we’ve already done that and we ended up with low salaries. Pointing out issues with MW merely means that we need understand the effects better and mitigate them; they certainly don’t mean rolling back the clock to a time before MW.

But we go yet another round going nowhere. I’m never going to admit that your studies are anything other than a starting point and you seem to be blind to the fact that even by your own math, some people will do better under MW than they otherwise would have.

And you pretend as if MW is the starting point whereas your free market ideas were the real starting point.

————————————————————————————————————

So when you say "no-one" you mean no-one aside from the 90% of economists that agree with the stated position, as supported in the OP?

No one that is power to affect real change. That speaks volumes about your evidence and your argument. Being practically universally ignored, which is where your ideas currently stand, doesn’t really bode well for your arguments.

Your position seems to rest on the decisions and beliefs of non-economists. IE an anti-science position. Do you accept the consensus of 90% of scientists polled and 85% of peer-reviewed work, or do you accept the position of people with no training in the area?

Correct but I wouldn’t call them anti science - they just don’t believe your results are true or complete and they don’t find your alternatives useful.

It’s also a stretch to call economists scientists to begin with; they’re religionists that do math to try and make the world fit into their simple models and whine about ‘artificial’ impacts when the world wants to do it’s own thing.

That’s the same conclusion I’ve come to thus far because you have been somewhat evasive as to the alternatives you’re really proposing and too one sided in your conclusions. And you do appear to be overstating some of your conclusions.

I don't disagree, why would we expect a government to endorse a position that decreases its own power?

I would expect a government to do the best it can to balance the needs of the weakest amongst us and growing the economy. If the government is already supplementing businesses low wages then it has every right now and then to redress that balance.

Can you show where, in this thread I've made an anarcho-capitalist argument? (It would be a surprise to me since I'm not an anarcho-capitalist). Plese support or retract that this is my argument.

I haven’t but you have proposed no government intervention in wages and no unions or collective bargaining as a solution. You’ve called government involvement “artificial” as if they were a burden onto your simple model of the world. So you tell me what you’re really arguing for?

Hint: The actual argument in this thread is: "the minimum wage has, when all factors are considered, a negative impact on those it is targeted at helping. It specifically has a disproportionately large negative impact (again, all other factors incorporated) on the poor and minorities."

That may well be what you want to argue but it’s a pointless argument because it is too narrow and too incomplete and your alternatives make little sense.

You evaded the question for obvious reasons, but it isn't that easy.

Question: At six months post MW enactment, which word describes poor people's monthly take home pay:

More

Less

And I answer again, that employers choose to pay less.

This is up there for one of the most bizarre sentences I've read here. Can you support (or retract) that a market that has a price floor (such as a minimum wage) is a "free market."

The course it’s still a free market. Only one small trigger is being pulled and one that the government, being not only a representative of the workers, but also an active participant in the overall wage bill anyway, has absolute right to pull.

A government mandated floor is no different from an individual worker setting a floor on their services. That you choose to define free market as not involving government involvement in regulations makes no sense.

And, to be perfectly pedantic, because you seem to have a habit here of ignoring the obvious: 85% of all peer reviewed studies, and 90% of all economists agree that people are better off when you don't impose a minimum wage.

It’s irrelevant what the results are. If our starting point is low wages and we want to fix it then we apply MW and fix issues as they come up. It is the employers making all these decisions so we need to legislate more precisely so that the negative effects can be mitigated.

Those are not reasons to use MW, those are reasons to do more research. Absent an alternative, which doing nothing is not an alternative, MW is the path to take.

Support or retract where I've said either of these statements.

Again, the thread's premise and scope is solely about the relatively undisputed fact that, "he minimum wage has, when all factors are considered, a negative impact on those it is targeted at helping. It specifically has a disproportionately large negative impact (again, all other factors incorporated) on the poor and minorities."

And I am not denying that. I am denying this is a good reason not to do MW unless there is a better alternative. Which you don’t have.

The thread is ridiculously limited to a single datapoint and it’s research is woefully incomplete. Brought into the real world, its isolated results have barely any impact on the actual challenges facing governments.

Please support or retract that the studies presented in this thread are not applicable to the labor market.

I didn’t say the “labor market” I said you haven’t shown that your results are universally applicable around the world in all societies and all economies.

Again, to reiterate, Please support or retract that I have said that.

Um, that’s kinda of your argument that we shouldn’t have minimum wage. That sounds like doing nothing to me. You have offered no realistic alternatives. And worse, you have failed to explain the failure of your own ideas in the free market of ideas!

You are not offering solutions that have realistic impact so your net gain in mindshare is nothing.

What I'm asking is, if we presume someone has cancer, do we adopt a procedure that 85% of medical studies and 90% of doctors agree will make it worse (And the remaining 15/10% say won't have any effect at all)?

Your scenario is rubbish, your world view is no government intervention. This is the same as no medical intervention. You don’t have to say it because it is already part of your free market argument.

And likening doctors, which actually have a real world track record of being right, the same cannot be said of your economists, who appear to be constantly surprised at the latest crash.

And medical studies are based on actual physical sciences, yours relies on a simple model of two dimensions and calls other real word participants “artificial”.

You'll have to explain your bizarre need for this in inflation adjusted terms. Since we aren't talking about wages over a period of time, but in two different scenarios, there isn't an inflation adjustment required. I really don't mean to be a jerk about this, but you've added a term to your scenario that is meaningless to make it sound like you understand economics. Unless you can support why an inflation adjustment would apply across two scenarios that happen at the same time (or even how it would be possible to do an inflation adjustment) is necessary, please retract that as part of your request.

The reason why inflation is important is because MW hasn’t kept up with inflation. In real terms, it has reduced. So increasing MW is really getting back to where it should be relative to when MW was first introduced. You’ll have to go back to before MW, look at the job’s salary, and adjust it forward to show that your case has merit. And you also need to show that the salary would have been better without the MW to begin with.

Until you have the whole scenario laid out with and without MW and inflation adjusted, you don’t really have a complete picture for us to determine whether MW is a good thing or not.

As for the scenarios. I want to be perfectly clear that there is no need for me to "support" anything based on your request for additional criteria. If you feel a formal challenge still applies, please open up a thread in ask the staff for Mican to adjudicate. Improper use of formal challenges to goad an opponent into supporting a position they have not held is generally considered trolling. So please respond to this section with either an ask the staff thread or a retraction of your challenge.

Do whatever you want - I disbelieve that any of your math or evidence is relevant to the situation as to whether MW is really doing a good thing or not. As I keep saying, it’s an incomplete picture that doesn’t include the scenario of no MW and it does examine the reasons why employers behave the way they do when MW is raised. It’s all useless.

At that point, I'm happy to discuss what changes and updates you would like to see included in the table. I've literally been asking for you to define what you think has been left out for several pages now.

I have already asked for this! Here in a simple list:

1. What is the comparative scenario for when no MW was ever applied?
2. What other legislation could the government apply to reduce these outcomes? And which would be more successful and non-circumventable?

Yes, it is a reality that they have to live with Sharmak. You can simply ignore it in your quest for social progress, but they cannot. There is no "may" about it. There are hundreds of studies and volumes of data showing that they are, in fact, hurt by the MW enactment. You can blame employers, or systematic racism, or whatever other boogeyman you would like to assuage your feeling of guilt, but there is no rationalization that you've offered here that changes this simple fact; "in a world with a higher MW, more lower income families are in multi-generational poverty than in a world without that higher MW."

I’m not ignoring reality: you are. I am saying given that these are the reactions to MW, we need to either find alternatives or prevent employers from behaving the way they do. You’re saying that this is sufficient of a reason not to raise MW or not even to have it.

However, given the taxpayer is the ultimate backfiller of salaries, i.e. the taxpayer, it is incumbent upon the government to make sure businesses pay their rightful dues. If they cannot or will not then unfortunately, they just have to go out of business: we’re not here to enrich companies

You stated earlier that businesses are unrepetently greedy, right?

So if those businesses could have operated more efficiently (which is what you are arguing) they would have gotten more profits (the definition of efficiency), right?

So why didn't they do that without the minimum wage?

Are they so dumb that they didn't understand their own business, but you, Sharmak, do?

Or were they not greedy until you enacted the minium wage?

It’s not wholly about greed - it’s about the taxpayer supplementing low income workers’ salaries so that companies could afford to produce a good or service. If those goods/services are no longer profitable given a rise in MW, then it is wholly up them to make such a determination. But that just means that we as taxpayers are propping up these companies and encouraging them to take advantage of workers, knowing that the government will help them out.

I've now offered a half dozen studies showing that employers have to accept market wages, but to no avail. Now it is your turn. Support or retract that employers have monopsony power in the US.

I have done - in the migrant workers example, in the example from Singapore where employees in one sector had a wage disparity with the rest of the country. The success of governments and unions to force a fair wage beyond what employees pay clearly shows employers have monopsony power.

In fact, your own examples of employers cutting hours (i.e. reducing salaries) or firing people (reducing to zero) shows precisely the powers you claim they don’t have.

And you realize that that is an appeal to authority fallacy right? Or are you seriously arguing that politicians know more than scientists on these issues?

It’s a little precious to call economists scientists in the first place, but even ignoring that, you’re appealing to ‘science’ as an authority yourself.

Politicians aren’t scientists but they take into account many factors, including social and politics aspects to make a decision. And if economists are so lacking in advice on how to mitigate the low wage issue, it is little wonder they are ignored.

You do realize that the science says the exact opposite of this right? That MW ensures they are paid more poorly?

Well, they say that employers cause workers to be paid less, yes. So the next step, again, is to understand why this is so and make it less likely to happen.

Fair enough, I agree that there are other solutions. What I'm asking you, to deal with the actual thread at hand is the question here. Answer the question Sharmak;

If I were to offer a course of treatment that 85% of medical journals and 90% of doctors said would make your illness worse (and the remaining said would have no effect) would you adopt that treatment or would you say "no, lets look for something else?"

Economists are in no way at the same level of trust as with other sciences. Your analogy fails, as do all the claims that economists have made in trying to make the world fit into their simplified models.

The thread at hand here is to suggest that MW causes harm and we therefore shouldn’t have it. I may agree with the former (incomplete as it is) and disagree with the latter.

My dialog with you has shown that you cannot argue beyond the narrow boundaries of your OP but it is beyond those boundaries where your tight fitting argument fails.

These studies are not new and the ideas are not new and one would think that the ideas you present would be tried but they haven’t been tried have they? That you ad-hom every economist that disagrees with you and claim that politicians are ‘anti-science’ and insist that I only answer your specific narrow questions pretty much explains why you have failed to persuade me and why economists have failed to persuade governments.

Your constant failure to promote your world view of a ‘free market’ here mirrors that of the real world. You keep forgetting that it is the ‘free market’, absent government assistance or unions, is where we started began. MW is a reaction against the free market. So going back to not doing anything or reducing MW, are not solutions that make sense: we’ve already done that and we ended up with low salaries.

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

I've now offered a half dozen studies showing that employers have to accept market wages, but to no avail. Now it is your turn. Support or retract that employers have monopsony power in the US.

Here's a little more about your claim that employers have to accept market wages. They cover the sports, teachers, professors, and minimum wage workers. Your general statement appears to be wholly incorrect. Even in the case of MW, it is still an open question whether your point is even true. So I have to say that either your claims are wholly false or there is enough doubt that can be cast on them.

The fact of the contradictions and opposing studies and ideas pretty much tells me economics may need to do a bit more work in providing consistent results. Perhaps it may be due to political viewpoints but I suspect that it is also due to the fact that it's not really a reliable discipline. Anyway, there are plenty more articles so at best your position is questionable and most certainly as clear cut or proven as you keep claiming.

Professional sports provide a setting in which economists can test theories of wage determination in competitive versus monopsony labor markets. In their analyses, economists assume professional teams are profit-maximizing firms that hire labor (athletes and other workers) to produce a product: entertainment bought by the fans who watch their games and by other firms that sponsor the games. Fans influence revenues directly by purchasing tickets and indirectly by generating the ratings that determine television and radio advertising revenues from broadcasts of games.
In a competitive system, a player should receive a wage equal to his or her MRP—the increase in team revenues the player is able to produce. As New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner once put it, “You measure the value of a ballplayer by how many fannies he puts in the seats.”
The monopsony model, however, predicts that players facing monopsony employers will receive wages that are less than their MRPs. A test of monopsony theory, then, would be to determine whether players in competitive markets receive wages equal to their MRPs and whether players in monopsony markets receive less.
Since the late 1970s, there has been a major shift in the rules that govern relations between professional athletes and owners of sports teams. The shift has turned the once monopsonistic market for professional athletes into a competitive one. Before 1977, for example, professional baseball players in the United States played under the terms of the “reserve clause,” which specified that a player was “owned” by his team. Once a team had acquired a player’s contract, the team could sell, trade, retain, or dismiss the player. Unless the team dismissed him, the player was unable to offer his services for competitive bidding by other teams. Moreover, players entered major league baseball through a draft that was structured so that only one team had the right to bid for any one player. Throughout a player’s career, then, there was always only one team that could bid on him—each player faced a monopsony purchaser for his services to major league baseball.
Conditions were similar in other professional sports. Many studies have shown that the salaries of professional athletes in various team sports fell far short of their MRPs while monopsony prevailed.
When the reserve clauses were abandoned, players’ salaries shot up—just as economic theory predicts. Because players could offer their services to other teams, owners began to bid for their services. Profit-maximizing owners were willing to pay athletes their MRPs. Average annual salaries for baseball players rose from about $50,000 in 1975 to nearly $1.4 million in 1997. Average annual player salaries in men’s basketball rose from $109,000 in 1976 to $2.24 million in 1998. Football players worked under an almost pure form of monopsony until 1989, when a few players were allowed free agency status each year. In 1993, when 484 players were released to the market as free agents, those players received pay increases averaging more than 100%. Under the NFL collective bargaining agreement in effect in 1998, players could become unrestricted free agents if they had been playing for four years. There were 305 unrestricted free agents (out of a total player pool of approximately 1,700) that year. About half signed new contracts with their old teams while the other half signed with new teams. Table 14.1 “The Impact of Free Agency” illustrates the impact of free agency in four professional sports.
Table 14.1 The Impact of Free Agency

Player Salaries As Percentage of Team Revenues

MLB

NBA

NFL

NHL

1970–73

15.9

46.1

34.4

21.3

1998

48.4

54.2

55.4

58.4

Free agency has increased player share of total revenues in each of the major men’s team sports. Table 14.1 “The Impact of Free Agency” gives player salaries as a percentage of team revenues for major league baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL) and the National Hockey League (NHL) during the 1970–1973 period that players in each league worked under monopsony conditions and in 1998, when players in each league had gained the right of free agency.

Given the dramatic impact on player salaries of more competitive markets for athletes, events such as the 2004–2005 lockout in hockey came as no surprise. The agreement between the owners of hockey teams and the players in 2005 to limit the total payroll of each team reinstates some of the old monopsony power of the owners. Players had a huge financial stake in resisting such attempts.

Monopsony in Other Labor Markets

A firm that has a dominant position in a local labor market may have monopsony power in that market. Even if a firm does not dominate the total labor market, it may have monopsony power over certain types of labor. For example, a hospital may be the only large employer of nurses in a local market, and it may have monopsony power in employing them.
Colleges and universities generally pay part-time instructors considerably less for teaching a particular course than they pay full-time instructors. In part, the difference reflects the fact that full-time faculty members are expected to have more training and are expected to contribute far more in other areas. But the monopsony model suggests an additional explanation.
Part-time instructors are likely to have other regular employment. A university hiring a local accountant to teach a section of accounting does not have to worry that that person will go to another state to find a better offer as a part-time instructor. For part-time teaching, then, the university may be the only employer in town—and thus able to exert monopsony power to drive the part-time instructor’s wage below the instructor’s MRP.

A striking example of monopsony in an American labor market is professional baseball. Until 1976, the “reserve clause” in player contracts bound each player to a single team, an extreme form of collusion. As a result, teams did not compete for players. Estimates by Scully (1974) and others indicate that rate of monopsonistic exploitation was very high during this era — players were paid less than half of the value of their contribution to output, and possibly as little as one-seventh. After the reserve clause was eliminated in 1976, players with at least six years’ experience became free to negotiate with other teams. Salaries subsequently soared. By 1989, the rate of exploitation was estimated to have fallen close to zero (Zimbalist, 1992).The early history of baseball, when rival leagues occasionally appeared, yields similar estimates of monopsony exploitation. Rival leagues undercut the reserve clause, which could only be enforced among teams in the same league. Thus the appearances of the American Association in 1882, the American League in 1901, and the Federal League in 1913 each prompted rapid increases in player salaries. But when the rival league was bought out or merged into the dominant league, salaries always dropped sharply — usually by about a half (Kahn, 2000). This history suggests that, in the absence of rival leagues, early professional baseball players were paid no more than half of the value of their contribution to output.While no serious rivals to Major League Baseball have appeared since the early twentieth century, rival leagues have frequently appeared in other professional sports. For example, the American Basketball Association challenged the National Basketball Association from 1967 to 1976, the World Hockey Association challenged the National Hockey League from 1971 to 1979, and the United States Football League challenged the National Football League from 1982 to 1985. The appearance of each of these rivals seems to have caused player salaries to increase substantially in their respective sports (Kahn, 2000).An even more striking example of monopsony is the market for college athletes. These players are clearly employees in all but name, but the National Collegiate Athletic Association strictly limits the amounts that athletes at member colleges and universities can receive. The value of the output of top college football players has been estimated at about $500,000 (Brown, 1993), many times more than such athletes are “paid.”Teachers and Nurses

For the last few decades, researchers have investigated whether the markets for American school teachers and nurses are characterized by monopsony. Both professions may face a limited number of potential employers in any given geographical region. For teachers, employers are school districts, which are separated by political boundaries. For nurses, the dominant employers are hospitals, which are dispersed geographically except in large metropolitan areas. Moreover, teachers and nurses are (still) predominantly married women, who may find it difficult to move to a new geographic area if their husbands are employed. Researchers have considered both oligopsony and differentiation.Early investigations measured the relationship between employer concentration and wages. A negative relationship, holding everything else constant, would suggest oligopsony. Several early studies — for example, Luizer and Thornton (1986) for teachers and Link and Landon (1976) for nurses — did in fact find negative relationships. Yet it is unclear whether everything else was held constant in these studies. Highly concentrated markets with small numbers of employers for teachers or nurses tend to be rural areas and small cities. Less concentrated markets with many alternative employers tend to be large cities. But pay for most other occupations — even less specialized ones with many potential employers — is lower in rural areas and small cities, so it is not clear that monopsony is to blame. Indeed, studies by Adamache and Sloan (1982), Boal and Ransom (1999), Hirsch and Schumacher (1995), and others have shown that employer concentration has little effect on the wages of teachers and nurses after controlling for city size or the general wage level.A more recent investigation by Sullivan (1989) focused on differentiation among employers of nurses. Using data on hospitals, Sullivan estimated that if a hospital cut wages by one percent, it would lose only about 1.3 percent of its nurses immediately. This suggests that hospitals enjoy substantial power over wages. However, Sullivan also showed that a hospital would lose four percent of its nurses within three years and presumably even more in the long run. Sullivan’s estimates imply that if the hospital “considers the future,” it is unlikely to lower wages much more than about 10 percent below the contribution of the marginal nurse to hospital revenue.Another recent study by Boal (2001) estimated the effects of legal minimum salaries on employment of teachers in two states. That study found that increases in legal minimum salaries tended to decrease employment, suggesting that the market for teachers was more competitive than monopsonistic.University Professors

Several researchers have suggested that moving costs give a university monopsony power over its existing workforce because professors face moving costs. This is because professors have highly specialized skills and their potential employers (universities) are widely dispersed geographically. Now the market for newly-hired professors is surely competitive, because new hires must pay moving costs no matter who hires them. But the market for existing professors is monopsonized because professors, once hired, may require a substantial wage increase to switch universities. Moreover, since pay is usually adjusted over time for performance, universities cannot promise future salary increases at the time of original hire, as school districts do. Assuming some professors have higher moving costs than others, a modest cut in wages for existing professors will not cause them all to leave.The model of moving costs predicts a negative relationship between wages and seniority (time spent at the same university). Ransom (1993) measured this relationship, after controlling for total teaching experience, education level, and other factors influencing professors’ productivity. He did find a negative relationship — the penalty for senior professors appeared to be roughly 5 to 15 percent. However, formal models of moving costs imply that newly-hired professors are paid more than the competitive salary level (in anticipation of later exploitation — see Black and Loewenstein, 1991) so not all of this penalty is exploitation.Miners in Company Towns

Textbooks often cite company towns as classic examples of monopsony, especially towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when transportation was expensive. A company town is a small town located in a remote area with only one employer. Company towns were most common in mining, where the town’s location was dictated by mineral deposits. Often the employer owned all the housing and operated all stores and other services in the town. This arrangement might seem to give the employer “control” over its workforce and monopsony power through severe differentiation of employers. However, Fishback (1992) has argued that this arrangement actually reduced living costs for employees by eliminating market imperfections in housing and retail markets. High turnover rates in company towns also cast doubt on the view that workers were “locked in” to their employers (see Boal, 1995).Company towns were especially widespread in Appalachian coal mining in the early twentieth century. In West Virginia, for example, 79 percent of coal miners lived in company-owned housing in the early 1920s. Nevertheless, Boal (1995) showed that coal mining companies were not very differentiated and enjoyed little power over wages, at least in the long run. A one-percent cut in wages would cause at least two percent of the workforce to be lost the same year, and most of it to be lost in the long run. Thus coal miners seemed to “move with ease.” Assuming employers “considered the future” with discount rates of no more than 10 percent, they would push wages down only about 5 percent, according to his estimates.Early Textile Mill Workers

Several researchers have investigated whether America’s first factories — New England textile mills — enjoyed monopsony power. Some researchers believe that as these factories grew in size, they were forced to raise wages in order to attract workers from farther away, at least in the early nineteenth century (Lebergott, 1960). Other researchers find no relationship between firm size and wage, but find evidence of collusion by employers in setting wages (Ware, 1966).Still other researchers have tried to measure the rate of exploitation by comparing the value of the last mill worker’s contribution to output with her wage (most mill workers were women). Implied rates of exploitation range from 9% to over 100% for particular mills in particular years. However, most estimates of the last mill worker’s contribution to output are extremely imprecise, so most calculated rates of exploitation are not significantly different from zero (Vedder, Gallaway, and Klingaman, 1978). Moreover, the largest estimates are for the middle nineteenth century, not the early nineteenth century (Zevin, 1975).Low-wage Workers

All monopsony models suggest that a modest increase in legal minimum wages should increase employment. In the United States, minimum wages affect only young and unskilled workers. Most studies of the effects of legal minimum wages in the 1970s and early 1980s found small decreases in employment for young unskilled workers, as predicted by the competitive model. However, later studies found almost no effect on employment (see Wellington, 1991) and a few studies found increases in employment as predicted by the monopsony model (see Card and Krueger, 1995). However, these latter studies are controversial (see exchange between Neumark and Wascher, 2000, and Card and Krueger, 2000) and have not convinced the majority of labor economists (see Whaples, 1996). In any case, the rate of exploitation, if positive, is probably small.

This article investigates the degree of monopsony power of employers in different industries against the background of a statutory minimum wage introduction in Germany in January 2015. A semi-structural estimation approach is employed based on a dynamic model of monopsonistic competition. The empirical analysis relies on a linked employer–employee data set which allows to control for observed heterogeneity both on the worker and on the firm side. The results show important differences in monopsonistic competition among low-wage industries: While retailing, the hotel and restaurant industry as well as agriculture can be described as monopsonistic labour markets, this is not true for other services and manufacturing of food products. From a policy point of view, the introduction of a uniform minimum wage may therefore lead to different employment reactions in industries with a similar minimum wage bite.

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

All the points are related to this thread.

No they weren't. Please see the title of the thread and the OP. This thread is solely about the impact of the minimum wage. If you want to discuss the underlying rationalizations for starting the minimum wage, that is fine, feel free to start another thread. But responses of that sort within this thread are spam.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

No one that is power to affect real change.

You are familiar with an appeal to authority fallacy right? Appealing to a politician's views to reject those of a trained economist on a matter of economic concern is clearly an appeal of that type.

What's more, its a startlingly anti-science position. You are, quite literally, saying that we should reject the consensus finding of 85% of peer-reviewed research and 90% of economists in favor of your party's political position?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

I haven’t but you have proposed no government intervention in wages and no unions or collective bargaining as a solution. You’ve called government involvement “artificial” as if they were a burden onto your simple model of the world. So you tell me what you’re really arguing for?

So you are retracting that I've made that argument. Thank you. Please note that if you make that claim again without support it is a rule violation.

I called government setting of price floors artificial because that is literally what that term means, a constraint placed from outside the system. It isn't a value judgement or moral condemnation, it is a simple objective fact that when government creates a law setting prices, those prices are artificial to the price system.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

That may well be what you want to argue but it’s a pointless argument

Perhaps, but it is the argument of this thread. If you want to have a different debate, start a different thread.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

And I answer again, that employers choose to pay less.

Thank you for conceding the thread. You agree, that poor people's monthly take home pay in the presence of minimum wage is less.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

The course it’s still a free market. Only one small trigger is being pulled and one that the government

Sharmak, this isn't a defense or support of your claim, it is simply a restatement of your claim in more verbose terms.

Support or Retract that that a market that has a government set price floor is a "free market."

Originally Posted by Sharmak

It’s irrelevant what the results are.

Wow. So you are seriously maintaining that it doesn't matter if poor people are harmed by your policies?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

And I am not denying that.

Sharmak, you did not respond to the support challenge. Support or retract that I said the following statements as you claimed, "You're literally saying do nothing and literally saying you have no alternative solution."

Originally Posted by Sharmak

I didn’t say the “labor market” I said you haven’t shown that your results are universally applicable around the world in all societies and all economies.

You mean, to the entire body of people seeking employment and seeking labor? IE, the labor market?

Regardless, you cannot shift the burden here. You made the following claim: "your studies since they're not generally applicable anyway" You need to either support or retract that claim.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Um, that’s kinda of your argument that we shouldn’t have minimum wage. That sounds like doing nothing to me.

What a spectacular lack of imagination then. Are you seriously maintaining that the only concievable action we could do is a MW? There is literally no other policy, social, or economic option?

Regardless, it is your claim to support. Please support or retract that I have argued that we should "do nothing."

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Your scenario is rubbish, your world view is no government intervention. This is the same as no medical intervention.

Let's presume that that was my argument here for a moment (it isn't, but lets presume). Let's also agree that we can equate the medical intervention to MW for a moment.

Here are the two options. Pick one:

Scenario 1: With Medical Intervention you take the option that 85% of studies and 90% of doctors agree will kill you (and the remaining 15/10% say won't have any effect at all) and you still have cancer.

Scnario 2: Without Medical Intervention you just have cancer.

Which option is better?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Please stop comparing economics to science and economists to scientists

Support or retract that economics is not a science.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

The reason why inflation is important is because MW hasn’t kept up with inflation.

Apparently you completely misunderstand what it means to account for inflation, or you misunderstand the scenario, or both. I agree that MW is not inflation adjusted, who cares? We aren't arguing whether scenario A in 1996 is better than Scenario B in 1943. We are arging both of them at the same point in time. Both are in 2017 dollars. If we were to add in a column with no minimum wage at all, that would also be in 2017 dollars. Thus, even if we were to design some kind of inflation adjustment it would apply equally to all three scenarios.

If you are, instead, asking for the MW increase section to be recalculated as if MW had been inflation adjusted, I'm happy to do that, but of course that would also affect the number of people unemployed right (since they are a factor of the percent increase in MW)? Is that what you are asking?

[I should note that this really doesn't affect the table much, if we take the MW when originally passed and inflation adjust it to 2015 dollars it is about $4.60. If we take the 1968 peak, it is about $10.80 in 2015 dollars].

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Do whatever you want -

I appreciate the retraction.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

1. What is the comparative scenario for when no MW was ever applied?
2. What other legislation could the government apply to reduce these outcomes? And which would be more successful and non-circumventable?

1) I'm concerned with your use of the word "ever" in the above. I'll assume it means "no minimum wage applied." I'll insert the table below with that added.

2) Outside the scope of this thread. I'm happy to consider other policy positions, but we need to fully assess the negative impacts of this one first.

Table No MW (6.75/hr vs $15/hr Proposal

From $2400 to $0 (40 hrs @ 6.75/hr to 0 hrs @$0/hr)

31% (utilizing established 3.9% increase for 10% MW increase)

From $1080 to $1310 (40 hrs @ $6.75/hr to 21.8 hrs @$15/hr, representing the 230/month increase from the data)

33.81% (49% of the remaining)

From $1080 to $794 (40 hrs @ $11/hr to 13.2 hrs @$15/hr, representing the 286/month decrease from the data)

35.19% (51% of remaining)

So for every 100 people we saw:

Employment Effect

Total Wage Effect

Total Benefits paid/week

31 people lost their jobs

-$33,480

$58,280 (31 people, 200 per week +1760 lost wages)

34 people took home more pay

+$7,820

$-32,800 (These 34 people no longer need benefits)

35 people took home less pay

-$5,375

$55,790 (35 people, 200 per week +$794 lost wages

Total

A loss of -$31,035 in wages

Increase of $81,270 benefits paid)

Originally Posted by Sharmak

It’s not wholly about greed - it’s about the taxpayer supplementing low income workers’ salaries

Red Herring Fallacy. You ignored the point offered with an irrelevant discussion about corporate subsidies.

You argued in your last post that a business would "find ways to operate more efficiently," so why wouldn't they do that absent a minimum wage? Why wouldn't they follow their greed towards higher profits? Is it that they are so dumb they can only see it if forced to by your benevolent hand?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

I have done - in the migrant workers example, in the example from Singapore where employees in one sector had a wage disparity with the rest of the country.

Migrant workers were just a hypothetical you invented, you presented no evidence on monopsony power in that industry. Likewise, you can't offer Singapore data as an example of US monopsony power, especially when that study specifcially argues that there was no observable monopsony power in the US.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

In fact, your own examples of employers cutting hours (i.e. reducing salaries) or firing people (reducing to zero) shows precisely the powers you claim they don’t have.

You do realize that none of these are monopsony power right?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

you’re appealing to ‘science’ as an authority yourself.

Sharmak, it isn't an appeal to authority fallacy to appeal to an expert versed in the topic. It is only a fallacy when you appeal to an expert not versed in the topic. Like appealing to a doctor to explain quantum mechanics. Appealing to economists to explain economics is clearly not a fallacy. Appealing to politicians, as you have done, is.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

So the next step, again, is to understand why this is so and make it less likely to happen.

As already shown in thread, the majority of employment loss is due to closing down of businesses, especially businesses owned by lower income owners in lower income neighborhoods.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Here's a little more about your claim that employers have to accept market wages.

You do realize that I already noted that there are monopsonistic forces in professional sports about a half dozen pages ago, right? Are you seriously arguing that the minimum wage would apply to professional sports players? Or that professional sports players meet the definition of low skilled labor?

Did you simply copy my second link and pretend it was your own evidence? Sorry Sharmak, that doesn't quite cut it here. Especially when the summary of that article is:

Monopsony does not appear to have been important in company mining towns, a standard textbook example, or in markets for teachers and nurses, early suspects. In fact, the largest plausible estimates of monopsony exploitation to date are not for blue-collar workers but rather for professional athletes and possibly college professors.

Your third link relates to Germany, not the US, so it doesn't count as support for monopsony power in low skilled US labor markets. Please try again.

Support or retract that employers have monopsony power in the US over low skilled labor.

"Suffering lies not with inequality, but with dependence." -Voltaire

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” -G.K. Chesterton

Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Squatch347

No they weren't. Please see the title of the thread and the OP. This thread is solely about the impact of the minimum wage. If you want to discuss the underlying rationalizations for starting the minimum wage, that is fine, feel free to start another thread. But responses of that sort within this thread are spam.

If you are recommending, as you have done several times, to not have MM then the scope is already expanded. You have also suggested the same problems for unions so the scope is beyond even MM.

Besides, if all you are doing is discussing a bunch of studies that have been ignored in a discipline that is also ignored and limiting all discussion to those people and ideas limited to those supporting your case then it’s not really much of a debate is it?

Your entire OP is essentially saying, look at my decades worth of studies (that people outside of the discipline have ignored) from a discipline (that governments have ignored) and agree with me that the studies studies say what they say. And if there is disagreement, it can only be on the specific matters only of your own choosing, that the relevance of the studies is outside of the scope, as is examining the truth of them. Further, that the influence of the studies (which take into account other matters) is irrelevant in the discussion of them!

Is that seriously how you want to take this now? That I am only limited to comment on the scope of the discussion about MW when your own OP is talking about removing it? It’s kinda ridiculous not to discuss how we’re in the situation in the first place especially since it’s your own recommendation!

I haven’t gone much further into your post but I can’t help your last challenge appears to now limit the scope of the OP to just the US? Correct? Are you seriously turning this into a tautology of self-affirmation or are we supposed to be discussing the real world (which is more than the US and which also ignores all your studies)?

I have to say a couple of us have had a nice little chuckle at this one - it’s typical cultish behavior when faced with the failures of your studies to affect the world and shows a very suspicious lack of understanding of the real world, particularly when it doesn’t quite go your way.

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by SharmaK

Your entire OP is essentially saying, look at my decades worth of studies (that people outside of the discipline have ignored) from a discipline (that governments have ignored) and agree with me that the studies studies say what they say.

So are you saying that we should ignore the consensus opinion by experts and decades of performance data on policies and rather side with our political affiliations?

If you have an argument related to the MW not having the effect stated in the OP or if you have data showing that it doesn't have that effect, I'm all for it. But if, as it appears you are want to do in this thread, you are going to simply say "well, uh, its more complicated" or "nu-uh its good" then you are simply spamming this thread.

Do you have evidence or argumentation to assert that the Minimum Wage does not negatively impact the most economically vulnerable?

"Suffering lies not with inequality, but with dependence." -Voltaire

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” -G.K. Chesterton

Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Squatch347

So are you saying that we should ignore the consensus opinion by experts and decades of performance data on policies ...

There are many self-anointed groups of experts around the different arguments for homeopathy too and for hundreds of years and much scientific evidence to support the efficacy of such treatments. I’m sure homeopathy practitioners all agree on how these treatments are good and that their cures have been working well and their papers enjoy consensus opinions on their discipline.

However, and I’m sure you agree, it is only when viewed from outside of the discipline and outside of the consensus, nearly all medical legislation and funding is moving away from supporting Homeopathy.

This is the same scenario that you’re setting for this discussion about MW. Worse, you only allow your side to speak, only allow the mainly negative aspects of MW that support the case you’re trying and forbid scenarios don’t (even as you recommend them yourself).

In addition, I withdraw my earlier statements saying that economics is not a science. I realize that you are making the positive claim so the burden of proof is on you. Please support or retract that “economics is a science” [challenge]

... and rather side with our political affiliations?

And one could make the same arguments about the politics of Homeopathy too. Your arguments are a little specious given your own views are very political and one sided.

Also on this point, I’m not sure this is a specifically partisan issue of conservatives vs progressives. Nearly all governments have used MW legislation to deal with wage disparities. So I have to ask you to retract or support this claim that it’s just about “political affiliations” in all the cases where MW has been applied around the world. [Challenge]

If you have an argument related to the MW not having the effect stated in the OP or if you have data showing that it doesn't have that effect, I'm all for it. But if, as it appears you are want to do in this thread, you are going to simply say "well, uh, its more complicated" or "nu-uh its good" then you are simply spamming this thread.

I am saying multiple things:

1. Your appeal to authority on this issue is unfounded. That all governments implementing MW have ignored it is part of the reasons why it Is being implemented in the first place. In limiting discussion as to the consequences of MW without looking at a prior state or what to do about mitigating issues, your OP really does nothing to resolve the issue of helping MW workers.
2. Your refusal to look at the conditions for triggering MW is contradictory because your own recommendation is to not have MW or not raise it. So your argument is unfairly weighted towards your side of the argument. To call it spam when I’m literally discussing your recommendations is baffling.
3. It’s obviously more complicated than having MW or raising or not raising MW because nearly all governments will end up implementing MW. Your incomplete OP and reticence in tackling these issues is a little suspicious in light of the evidence we have at hand that your methods are practically universally ignored.
It is incorrect to appeal to the authority on “science” because you have not shown economics is a science in the first place (my earlier statements to say economics is not a science is withdrawn since the burden is on you to prove it is and not for me to show it isn’t). To say it is spam to not discuss the very points you are recommending makes no sense - you are literally saying only that only your own conclusions count unless specifically proven wrong only in the manner you prescribe.

So I don’t think you’ve made the case that your studies are science and I think (see below) you are over stating your claims and even if your studies are true, they don’t supply a holistic or realistic view of the situation nor have you made the case that your claims are applicable outside of their cultural context.

To use your analogy against you, you’re saying that surgeons cutting into patients causes blood loss and introduces the risk of infection. You have a lot of research from experts in the field that confirm cutting into bodies is risky and you enjoy 99% consensus on the matter.

What you’re not allowing is me saying that:

1. Cutting is the best way and possibly the only to treat the issue.
2. Not operating will cause worse problems.
3. We can do things to mitigate the risks.

Do you see how incomplete and limited and one sided your OP is? You have all the parameters of debate locked up, on the pain of spamming, such that dissent is only narrowly focused on your risks. See how your analogies failed so easily because you took such a narrow fictionally warped view of the real world - this is what you are doing. On this point alone, your OP should be withdrawn.

Do you have evidence or argumentation to assert that the Minimum Wage does not negatively impact the most economically vulnerable?

Since you don’t qualify your title, I would have to say that your own evidence shows that MW doesn’t affect ALL economically vulnerable in ALL scenarios throughout history. So it fails immediately since you have not demonstrated the statement of the OP.

You have also conceded out that SOME MW-workers are actually helped and even though you also point out that MI-workers are disproportionately helped that still means that your OP has failed: because not ALL EV people are affected.

In fact, you haven’t proven that it affects the MOST “economically vulnerable” at all: there are plenty of poor people that are worse off - the homeless for example, are more economically vulnerable than a minimum wage worker so your statement isn’t accurate.

So by your own measure, you are certainly overstating your case. Your OP fails on all those fronts as well as appealing to authority (ie only those people that are part of your consensus) and also by ignoring other important factors about MW (which you call spam, even though you recommend and discussed those scenarios yourself).

——- On Limiting The Debate —-
Your new tack of limiting the debate, when you yourself have engaged in those additional discussions yourself, certainly points to the fact that you know you’re not on solid ground outside of a limited set of disputed studies. Now that those discussions have gone against you after a couple of weeks, I’m finding that even your own case, using your own evidence is not particularly enlightening either: the fact is that all solutions have unwanted side effects and all you are doing is pointing out some problems that need resolving. I think you tried to take that as a ‘win’ for yourself earlier, which is fine, if that’s what you want: I agree that your disputed and ignored studies show that there have been unwanted side-effects from corporations that choose to harm their weakest workers rather than helping them.

You most certainly have not argued that not having MW nor increasing it is a good thing, which is where you have veered away from what you’re now claiming to be the discussion all along. It’s convenient to do so when you thought that line of discussion helped you earlier but when it now turned out not to help your case, to limit the debate so starkly, is rather telling.

If you wish to restrict the argument to the OP only, then I will take it that you withdraw all the statements regarding your recommendation that we do not raise MW or otherwise remove it; and that you also withdraw the recommendation that we don’t have unions or collective bargaining.

Worse though, your new hewing to OP makes the topic a tautology: basically asking whether the papers you reference point out some negative effects of MW. On that point, I have to agree they do point out negative effects of MW. So if that’s the kind of ‘win’ you want then you can have it! Bit of a hollow victory given that you have failed to persuade on every other point. If you’re just looking for affirmation of a paper you’ve read then any debate is kinda pointless.

Even then, let’s say that the evidence is true, then there would be no counter evidence for it, so even asking for counter evidence makes no sense. No one is arguing against reality (assuming that the economists are collecting and analyzing data correctly) so your limitations on the discussion make no sense. The only valid argument against the papers would be claims against methodology, math or applicability. None of which are useful debates on MW anyway.

Without thinking about the bigger picture the debate is pointless, you’re making the results appear much more effective and persuasive and final than they really are. They’re not effective since they’re being ignored by policy makers, they’re not persuasive because the results probably aren’t easily made applicable in other contexts and they’re not final since raising MW is only a start. In artificially limiting the debate to a set of negative studies you’re not really discussing MW-policy, you’re merely performing a confirmation bias exercise wherein only your negatives can be discussed, and only discussed out of context, indeed wholly out of context since you regard the discussions of reasons leading to MW as spam.

So I don’t really know what you are expecting out of this debate any more. It certainly isn’t to show that legislating MW is a “bad thing” since that appears to be out of scope now. It can’t be for your opponent to argue that MW is a “good thing” either since those topics are out of scope too.

You appear to be trying to construct an OP whereby you can only be agreed with! Which is kinda amusing but in the several years between when this thread was started and today, it appears that your side is still just as ineffective and unpersuasive as ever.

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

There are many self-anointed groups of experts around the different arguments for homeopathy too and for hundreds of years and much scientific evidence to support the efficacy of such treatments. I’m sure homeopathy practitioners all agree on how these treatments are good and that their cures have been working well and their papers enjoy consensus opinions on their discipline.

Homeopathy isn't a field, its an approach within medicine. A la Keynesianism or Market Monetarism within economics. Homeopathy was advocated within the field of medicine and rejected by...doctors. Doctors didn't reject homeopathy (or phrenology, or any other discredited practice) because it wasn't politically viable, or because it was unpopular in opinion polls. They rejected it because there wasn't scientific evidence that it was effective.

Have there been papers published in medical journals arguing that it is effective? Sure, but they are massively outweighed by those that show there is no positive effect. Regardless, the move away from homeopathy by doctors was based on medical literature, not because it wasn't popular.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

In addition, I withdraw my earlier statements saying that economics is not a science. I realize that you are making the positive claim so the burden of proof is on you. Please support or retract that “economics is a science” [challenge]

Perfect, I thank you for withdrawing that ridiculous line of argumentation.

As for it being a science, I think if you look back at our posts you'll notice that it was you, not me that begain arguing that we could include politicians as "experts" because there was no such field as economics. Regardless, the fact that the Nobel Prize is called: "The Nobel Price in Economic Sciences" should be your first clue. Surveying economics text books used by virtually all universities confirms this clue by describing the principles and techniques used by economists as scientific in nature, conforming to the scientific principle, and having the same methodology as most hard sciences.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Also on this point, I’m not sure this is a specifically partisan issue of conservatives vs progressives. Nearly all governments have used MW legislation to deal with wage disparities. So I have to ask you to retract or support this claim that it’s just about “political affiliations” in all the cases where MW has been applied around the world. [Challenge]

I don't think I said it was a partisan issue, I asked why we should accept your spurious notion that we reject trained experts and allow ourselves to rely on political affiliations (which is your claim, remember?). It was your position, not mine that a policy's affiliation within politics is relevant to its measured impact, not mine.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

1. Your appeal to authority on this issue is unfounded. That all governments implementing MW have ignored it is part of the reasons why it Is being implemented in the first place.

If we accept your appeal to authority fallacy. If you want to include political decisions as evidence related to the results of minimum wage, it is incumbant on you to show why those political decisions should be included within the scope of expert opinion. Thus far you've offered no evidence why a politician voting for minimum wage means it doesn't have the impact the actual, trained experts in the field agree it does.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

2. Your refusal to look at the conditions for triggering MW is contradictory because your own recommendation is to not have MW or not raise it.

Except...I haven't done that. You'll need to support that I have "refused to look at triggering conditions." You'll remember that I spent multiple, painful, posts showing you that monopsony conditions don't apply. Monopsony is...a triggering condition for MW (it is, in fact, the only triggering condition for MW that is economically based).

Originally Posted by Sharmak

3. It’s obviously more complicated than having MW or raising or not raising MW because nearly all governments will end up implementing MW.

And how is that relevant to whether or not them implementing those policies will have the effects noted?

Governments will all collect taxes as well. That doesn't affect the obvious reality that that effects economic output (in volume or form), right?

This thread is about discussing the latter, not the machinations of politicians and interest groups.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

even if your studies are true, they don’t supply a holistic or realistic view of the situation

I keep asking you what relevant factors they missed and you've yet to answer. What factors need to be considered that aren't related to whether the minimum wage causes unemployment?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

To use your analogy against you, you’re saying that surgeons cutting into patients causes blood loss and introduces the risk of infection. You have a lot of research from experts in the field that confirm cutting into bodies is risky and you enjoy 99% consensus on the matter.

No, I'm not. I'm saying that the consensus of 90% of doctors and 85% of peer reviewed papers is that the surgery you are suggesting will make the cancer worse.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

1. Cutting is the best way and possibly the only to treat the issue.
2. Not operating will cause worse problems.
3. We can do things to mitigate the risks.

Except, I haven't stopped you from any of those concepts, in fact, I've engaged you on all three. What I said was outside this thread was the political motivations and your bizzare argument's about "free markets as a religion." Discussions of that sort are clearly unrelated to the thread and are more about you avoiding data.

For you points, I've already rebutted all three.

1) Cutting here can't, by definition, be the "best" way to treat the issue if, as shown, cutting makes the issue worse.

2) I'm open to that discussion, but you've presented no data here. It is also a pretty big burden of proof to hurdle given that the entire point of the data is to show that the situation is worse than it would otherwise be. Feel free to try this approach, but you'll have to include some kind of magical factor that all the trained economists missed. Good luck. If you do, congrats on you Nobel Prize in economic sciences.

3) This is outside the scope of the OP, but I have been willing to entertain it. What you've tried to do in this thread is shift the burden and claim that because I haven't proved there aren't mitigations, the OP fails. That is patently ridiculous. If you think there are mitigations relevant to the OP, offer them. Again, you haven't offered anything. What could we do to mitigate the risks?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

You have also conceded out that SOME MW-workers are actually helped and even though you also point out that MI-workers are disproportionately helped that still means that your OP has failed: because not ALL EV people are affected.

I have to wonder whether you comprehended anything that was written earlier because this statement calls that into question. We've spent literally pages now talking about how it disproportionately affects those economically vulnerable populations.

Please support or retract that I claimed that all economically vulnerable people are negatively affected.

Do you have an objections to this table?

Table No MW (6.75/hr vs $15/hr Proposal

From $2400 to $0 (40 hrs @ 6.75/hr to 0 hrs @$0/hr)

31% (utilizing established 3.9% increase for 10% MW increase)

From $1080 to $1310 (40 hrs @ $6.75/hr to 21.8 hrs @$15/hr, representing the 230/month increase from the data)

33.81% (49% of the remaining)

From $1080 to $794 (40 hrs @ $11/hr to 13.2 hrs @$15/hr, representing the 286/month decrease from the data)

35.19% (51% of remaining)

So for every 100 people we saw:

Employment Effect

Total Wage Effect

Total Benefits paid/week

31 people lost their jobs

-$33,480

$58,280 (31 people, 200 per week +1760 lost wages)

34 people took home more pay

+$7,820

$-32,800 (These 34 people no longer need benefits)

35 people took home less pay

-$5,375

$55,790 (35 people, 200 per week +$794 lost wages

Total

A loss of -$31,035 in wages

Increase of $81,270 benefits paid)

I'd also like to point out that the following challenges are still in effect. It is is incumbent to support or retract those claims (not ignore them).

Support or retract that I said the following statements as you claimed, "You're literally saying do nothing and literally saying you have no alternative solution."

You made the following claim: "your studies since they're not generally applicable anyway" You need to either support or retract that claim.

Please support or retract that I have argued that we should "do nothing."

Support or Retract that that a market that has a government set price floor is a "free market."

Support or retract that: a) Migrant workers are proper comparables for all minimum wage employees. b) Migrant workers bargaining power is equal to minimum wage employees. c) Migrant workers make less in comparable jobs to minimum wage employees.

Support or retract that employers have monopsony power in the US over low skilled labor.

"Suffering lies not with inequality, but with dependence." -Voltaire

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” -G.K. Chesterton

Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Squatch347

Homeopathy isn't a field, its an approach within medicine. ... They rejected it because there wasn't scientific evidence that it was effective.

Right, and only by being outside of the field, if you like, can one see how wrong one is. And just like H was rejected on bad science, something H isn't really based on, the results of MW have been rejected because they have failed for being, presumably, useless. That is, the recommendation to not have or not reduce MW as you appear to be proposing is not a useful path.

Perfect, I thank you for withdrawing that ridiculous line of argumentation.

I'm not withdrawing it because it is 'ridiculous' - it is being withdrawn because the burden is not on me.

As for it being a science, I think if you look back at our posts you'll notice that it was you, not me that begain arguing that we could include politicians as "experts" because there was no such field as economics.

No, politicians, as an aggregate, are part institutions that are experts at determining what is best for their country, based on inputs from all sides, their own ideologies and how their voters direct them.

Regardless, the fact that the Nobel Prize is called: "The Nobel Price in Economic Sciences" should be your first clue. Surveying economics text books used by virtually all universities confirms this clue by describing the principles and techniques used by economists as scientific in nature, conforming to the scientific principle, and having the same methodology as most hard sciences.

"scientific in nature" doesn't make it science - a bit of math and rigor doesn't make it a science, it makes it a discipline. I don't see an experiments being done in economics, it's mainly observational, much like social studies. I have never heard of an economist being called a 'scientist'! On the point of the 'Economic Sciences' there is much to dispute there too - a simple google runs the gamut of arguments on either side; both with valid points but with the weight of the arguments leaning towards it not being a science. That said, if you will desist calling economics a science, then I will drop the point that it isn't.

and rather side with our political affiliations?

I don't think I said it was a partisan issue, I asked why we should accept your spurious notion that we reject trained experts and allow ourselves to rely on political affiliations (which is your claim, remember?). It was your position, not mine that a policy's affiliation within politics is relevant to its measured impact, not mine.

It was your own words I was responding, which seems to me that you are saying it is partisan. I am not saying it is about political affiliations at all - I literally said the opposite just now that all governments of all stripes use MW to solve the problem of wage disparity.

If we accept your appeal to authority fallacy. If you want to include political decisions as evidence related to the results of minimum wage, it is incumbant on you to show why those political decisions should be included within the scope of expert opinion. Thus far you've offered no evidence why a politician voting for minimum wage means it doesn't have the impact the actual, trained experts in the field agree it does.

Political decisions are made based on input from many sources, your results is really just one input, one that is consistently ignored by nearly all governments that have to tackle the issue. Economists are experts at economics but they are not general experts on policy. So expect me to accept the impact of your ignored results on MW then you have to also accept the 'expert' opinions of the policy makers that have taken (and rejected) the said results.

Except...I haven't done that. You'll need to support that I have "refused to look at triggering conditions." You'll remember that I spent multiple, painful, posts showing you that monopsony conditions don't apply. Monopsony is...a triggering condition for MW (it is, in fact, the only triggering condition for MW that is economically based).

Your exact words in #526 were: "This thread is solely about the impact of the minimum wage. If you want to discuss the underlying rationalizations for starting the minimum wage, that is fine, feel free to start another thread. But responses of that sort within this thread are spam."

This is deliberately ignoring the main issue as to why your results have not impact and should continue to be ignored. Without discussing these other issues you are deliberately not addressing the issues why your evidence is being ignored.

And how is that relevant to whether or not them implementing those policies will have the effects noted

It means that the effects noted are a better situation that before enacting the policies.

Governments will all collect taxes as well. That doesn't affect the obvious reality that that effects economic output (in volume or form), right?

This thread is about discussing the latter, not the machinations of politicians and interest groups.

To call policy making 'machinations' is ridiculous considering that is what governments do. It's clear that when things don't go your way you have to resort to ad hominem. We, at least I am, discussing the entire scenario, taking your recommendations as input. I still have to come to the conclusion that your results need to be ignored.

Limiting the debate on your narrow minded, narrow field of view is why you are having trouble with being convincing (much like your economists too, mind) and why you feel you have to bring the debate back to your supposed 'expertise'.

When you have to charge your opponent for 'spamming' just because your work is being put into a real world perspective, calling other economists partisans and charging politicians from all governments with 'machinations' is pretty much where you have already lost.

I keep asking you what relevant factors they missed and you've yet to answer. What factors need to be considered that aren't related to whether the minimum wage causes unemployment?

Firstly, the conditions before such policy decisions are made. Secondly, the conditions of the state of affairs if MW wasn't implemented. Your table doesn't cover either of these scenarios and only focus on some negative effects of MW.

No, I'm not. I'm saying that the consensus of 90% of doctors and 85% of peer reviewed papers is that the surgery you are suggesting will make the cancer worse.

That may be what you want to say but the real world effect of what you say offer only a narrow perspective, only one of multiple viewpoints. It like your surgeons are from the 1800's, probably where all the anti MW attacks come from. And I represent the modern surgeons that see that you may be right in some limited sense but the best route is still to perform the surgery because the overall benefits are better than not doing the surgery at all.

Except, I haven't stopped you from any of those concepts, in fact, I've engaged you on all three. What I said was outside this thread was the political motivations and your bizzare argument's about "free markets as a religion." Discussions of that sort are clearly unrelated to the thread and are more about you avoiding data.

Right, which is ridiculous because it's like just listening to one side of the story. Every group of experts complain that they're not being listened to and to keep focusing on one input and prevent discussions on other matters makes your discussion cultish. It's a completely fair description when you just have to talk about your preferred point of view on the situation.

1) Cutting here can't, by definition, be the "best" way to treat the issue if, as shown, cutting makes the issue worse.

Only according to your narrow and limited view. According to all other governments, whose expertise is to weigh all the pros and cons from all sides, you do not have consensus at all!

2) I'm open to that discussion, but you've presented no data here. It is also a pretty big burden of proof to hurdle given that the entire point of the data is to show that the situation is worse than it would otherwise be. Feel free to try this approach, but you'll have to include some kind of magical factor that all the trained economists missed. Good luck. If you do, congrats on you Nobel Prize in economic sciences.

But therein lies the rub, you don't appear to be equipped to thinking outside of the box. You want to limit debate and call out spam those aspects of the whole picture you don't like to discuss. So it's not about me missing out the magical 'factor' - it is you missing the point of policy making.

3) This is outside the scope of the OP, but I have been willing to entertain it. What you've tried to do in this thread is shift the burden and claim that because I haven't proved there aren't mitigations, the OP fails. That is patently ridiculous. If you think there are mitigations relevant to the OP, offer them. Again, you haven't offered anything. What could we do to mitigate the risks?

The OP fails so long as you continue with the line that we should not have MW, raise MW, or have collective bargaining. It's not ridiculous because when you make such recommendations without considering my own suggestion that this is just a first step, and a step taken by nearly all governments (of all stripes) after careful consideration (i.e. the experts at setting policy) then all you want to do is to block your ears.

And just because I don't have any specific mitigations at the moment, which are irrelevant any way, it certainly doesn't mean that you are correct that the entire story ends at when you want it to end.

Obviously, we do things, find issues and fix them, but until more studies are done with regards to understanding the motivations of companies' reactions, then I would conclude that we need to do more studies. I do not think you have made the case that no MW or no raising MW is a valid conclusion at this stage.

I have to wonder whether you comprehended anything that was written earlier because this statement calls that into question. We've spent literally pages now talking about how it disproportionately affects those economically vulnerable populations.

Please support or retract that I claimed that all economically vulnerable people are negatively affected.

It's in your own unqualified title. If you concede, as you do here, that your title is wrong then I agree.

And don't forget that your title is wrong in using the word "most" vulnerable. So you have to at least agree that your title needs modification.

Do you have an objections to this table?

Yes, I need to see what happens if nothing is done.

Support or retract that I said the following statements as you claimed, "You're literally saying do nothing and literally saying you have no alternative solution." Please support or retract that I have argued that we should "do nothing."

This has been answered multiple times. You are recommending that we do not raise MW and do not introduce MW, right? If so then you are literally suggesting doing nothing.

You made the following claim: "your studies since they're not generally applicable anyway" You need to either support or retract that claim.

Here I mean that you haven't made the case that your studies are applicable to all world economies in all of history.

Support or Retract that that a market that has a government set price floor is a "free market."

Noted earlier a few posts ago - I think that the government is part of the market because it defines its limits.

Support or retract that: a) Migrant workers are proper comparables for all minimum wage employees. b) Migrant workers bargaining power is equal to minimum wage employees. c) Migrant workers make less in comparable jobs to minimum wage employees.

Support or retract that employers have monopsony power in the US over low skilled labor.

Those points have been supported multiple times - please re-read the evidence I brought up and address specific concerns thereof. I can't keep repeating myself.

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by SharmaK

Right, and only by being outside of the field, if you like, can one see how wrong one is.

No, only by applying evidence based research on its effectiveness can we see if the approach works or not. Certainly it was medical researchers, not layman that were making that determination, correct?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

No, politicians, as an aggregate, are part institutions that are experts at determining what is best for their country,

So politicians always act for what is best for the country?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

"scientific in nature" doesn't make it science...I don't see an experiments being done in economics, it's mainly observational, much like social studies.

Actually, being scientific in nature is, quite literally, the definition of being a science. The need for "experimentation" only reveals how limited your experience in the hard sciences is. Astrophysics, climatology, most theoretical physics, and dozens of other areas you would concede as science don't generally perform experimentation. That is a high school level of understanding of how science works and what science is. Science is rather, the formulation of hypotheses, which are then verified by or rejected because of observational evidence.

Think here of climate models and observing warming trends, or predictions related to the radiative output of certain stellar formations, or predictions about the uniformity of cosmic background radiation confirmed by WMAP, etc, etc. None of these are "experiments," but they were certainly science.

I literally said the opposite just now that all governments of all stripes use MW to solve the problem of wage disparity.

This is, quite literally, the point I was making. Your argument is: "We shouldn't rely on trained experts in the field and their peer reviewed research, we need to accept the positions of politicians."

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Political decisions are made based on input from many sources, your results is really just one input

So, you agree with the President's decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord then, right? Afterall, it was made based on "input from many sources" since it was a political decision.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

This is deliberately ignoring the main issue

Context is important Sharmak. I was responding in that section to your attempt to include the justifications made by politicans (an appeal to authority fallacy), rather than economic triggering conditions. This thread is about the net results inflicted upon the economically vulnerable by minimum wage policies. If you want to compare it to a counterfactual with relevant economic points, sure, that is fine. But including unrelated political machinations by political parties isn't germane because they don't have a direct effect on the living conditions of the people in question.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

It means that the effects noted are a better situation that before enacting the policies.

Please support or retract that the existence of a government policy or program can only have net postive benefits.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Firstly, the conditions before such policy decisions are made. Secondly, the conditions of the state of affairs if MW wasn't implemented.

Those are literally the same thing you realize, right?

Ok, what are those conditions?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

That may be what you want to say but the real world effect of what you say offer only a narrow perspective, only one of multiple viewpoints.

To follow the analogy;

Squatch: I'm saying that the consensus of 90% of doctors and 85% of peer reviewed medical papers is that the surgery you are suggesting will make the cancer worse.

Sharmak: You aren't considering the input from the insurance companies, or the Hospital Administrators!

Sure, I'm not considering their input, because they are making judgements based on factors other than whether or not the treament will help the cancer make it worse.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Only according to your narrow and limited view. According to all other governments, whose expertise is to weigh all the pros and cons from all sides, you do not have consensus at all!

Well, no, according to the data Sharmak. What you are adding with the governments discussion is the idea that there are other considerations than whether the cancer gets worse or not. I'm asking you, what are those considerations?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

So it's not about me missing out the magical 'factor' - it is you missing the point of policy making.

So you are conceding that policy making uses other factors than just the net impact to those concerned its its process? I agree. My point is that those considerations are relatively irrelevant to the question here, which is, are their lives improved? Are they less employed? Are they subject to more intergenerational poverty? Do they have less take home pay?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

And just because I don't have any specific mitigations at the moment

Ok, if you don't have any mitigations to offer, why did you bring them into the thread? Given that, we can agree that you are conceding point three of your objections since even you don't claim there are relevant mitigation techniques not being considered here.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Yes, I need to see what happens if nothing is done.

Sharmak...did you even read the table?

The title is literally: Table No MW (6.75/hr vs $15/hr Proposal

From $2400 to $0 (40 hrs @ 6.75/hr to 0 hrs @$0/hr)

31% (utilizing established 3.9% increase for 10% MW increase)

From $1080 to $1310 (40 hrs @ $6.75/hr to 21.8 hrs @$15/hr, representing the 230/month increase from the data)

33.81% (49% of the remaining)

From $1080 to $794 (40 hrs @ $11/hr to 13.2 hrs @$15/hr, representing the 286/month decrease from the data)

35.19% (51% of remaining)

So for every 100 people we saw:

Employment Effect

Total Wage Effect

Total Benefits paid/week

31 people lost their jobs

-$33,480

$58,280 (31 people, 200 per week +1760 lost wages)

34 people took home more pay

+$7,820

$-32,800 (These 34 people no longer need benefits)

35 people took home less pay

-$5,375

$55,790 (35 people, 200 per week +$794 lost wages

Total

A loss of -$31,035 in wages

Increase of $81,270 benefits paid)

"Suffering lies not with inequality, but with dependence." -Voltaire

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” -G.K. Chesterton

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Squatch347

No, only by applying evidence based research on its effectiveness can we see if the approach works or not. Certainly it was medical researchers, not layman that were making that determination, correct?

Sure but the problem I see is that if we don't increase MW nor implement MW then what? Well, we'd be back where we started and wages will remain stagnant and either people will remain poor or the taxpayers will have to supplement companies. So at least, and this is where the political answer comes, I think, something is being done. It may be that any jobs lost will come back, or they may not be lost at all.

So politicians always act for what is best for the country?

And therein lies the flaw of your whole argument, people are not atoms, they don't always behave the way you want them to and they don't always behave in the same way under different situations. Economics is basically social studies with math and it expects everyone to behave in the most rational manner, which they don't always do, even if their self-interest is at stake. You can see Brexit is the most terrible debacle in that regard.

Politicians will sometimes act for what is best for the company and usually only when it benefits them politically. It's hard to know precisely how decisions are made but it has to mean something if nearly all politicians throughout history and across different geographic and economic conditions choose MW as a solution. That makes the economics missing something.

Actually, being scientific in nature is, quite literally, the definition of being a science. The need for "experimentation" only reveals how limited your experience in the hard sciences is. Astrophysics, climatology, most theoretical physics, and dozens of other areas you would concede as science don't generally perform experimentation. That is a high school level of understanding of how science works and what science is. Science is rather, the formulation of hypotheses, which are then verified by or rejected because of observational evidence.

Think here of climate models and observing warming trends, or predictions related to the radiative output of certain stellar formations, or predictions about the uniformity of cosmic background radiation confirmed by WMAP, etc, etc. None of these are "experiments," but they were certainly science.

Well, my high school 'understanding' of science is matched by your high school economics 101, trotted out by proponents of a particular political viewpoint without looking at the larger picture. And now that the insults have been traded, nearly all the other sciences do actually have experiments or at least can lead to experiments - otherwise, they're 'just' theoretical with no real-world validation. Now you're claiming experiments are now not experiments to show that economics is a science and I don't buy that line of argument because those are the exact things one would do to prove a hypothesis.

What is the equivalent for MW? Is it 100% guaranteed around the entire world and all possible economies and situations that MW will generally fail? I don't think you've proven that at all.

I'm not convinced that being adopted by a funding agency really makes it a science.

As far as the Nobel Institute, Wikipedia has the following to say:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_...nomic_SciencesSome critics argue that the prestige of the Prize in Economics derives in part from its association with the Nobel Prizes, an association that has often been a source of controversy. Among them is the Swedish human rights lawyer Peter Nobel, a great-grandson of Ludvig Nobel.[27] Nobel criticizes the awarding institution of misusing his family's name, and states that no member of the Nobel family has ever had the intention of establishing a prize in economics.[28] He explained that "Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society's well-being", saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation".[27]According to Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times, both of the former Swedish ministers of finance, Kjell-Olof Feldt and Gunnar Myrdal, wanted the prize abolished, saying, "Myrdal rather less graciously wanted the prize abolished because it had been given to such reactionaries as Hayek (and afterwards Milton Friedman)."[25] Relatedly, it has been noted that several members of the awarding committee have been affiliated with the Mont Pelerin Society.[29]In his speech at the 1974 Nobel Prize banquet, Friedrich Hayek stated that had he been consulted on the establishment of a Nobel Prize in economics, he would "have decidedly advised against it"[25][30] primarily because, "The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.... This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally."[30]Critics cite the apparent snub of Joan Robinson as evidence of the committee's bias towards mainstream economics,[31][32] though heterodox economists like Friedrich Hayek (Austrian School) and Ronald Coase (associated with new institutional economics) have won.Milton Friedman was awarded the 1976 prize in part for his work on monetarism. Awarding the prize to Friedman caused international protests.[33] Friedman was accused of supporting the military dictatorship in Chile because of the relation of economists of the University of Chicago to Pinochet, and a controversial six-day trip[34] he took to Chile during March 1975 (less than two years after the coup that deposed President Salvador Allende). Friedman himself answered that he never was an adviser to the dictatorship, but only gave some lectures and seminars on inflation and met with officials, including Augusto Pinochet, in Chile.[35]Four Nobel Prize laureates – George Wald, Linus Pauling, David Baltimore and Salvador Luria – wrote letters in October 1976 to the New York Times protesting Friedman's award.[36][37]The 1994 prize to John Forbes Nash caused controversy within the selection committee because of Nash's history of mental illness and alleged anti-Semitism.[38][39] The controversy resulted in a change to the rules governing the committee during 1994: Prize Committee members are now limited to serve for three years.[24]The 2005 prize to Robert Aumann was criticized by European press[who?] for his alleged use of game theory to justify his stance against the dismantling of Israeli settlements in occupied territories.[40]

So the Nobel Prize is controversial and fraught with various political considerations.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/20...-science-wang/ says E is not really a science:what is the building block of economics? People. Economics does not study any unit smaller than a collection of people. And human behavior can never be absolutely predicted or explained—not if we wish to believe in free will, at any rate.In fact, in a strict sense, economics does not even follow the scientific method. Engrained in the scientific method is the process of testing hypotheses with repeatable, falsifiable, and parameter-controlled experiments. Unfortunately for the field of economics, there are certain non-trivial barriers to experimentally tanking the Czechoslovakian economy over and over while controlling for interest rate levels. Oftentimes, the best economists can do is sit back and pore through the data given to them—data that is muddled by changing cultural standards, changing technological innovations, and changing time periods, among other factors.

And there are plenty of other articles that claim that economics isn't really a science. At best it is a discipline based on logic and reason. But the results of economics aren't really guaranteed since they model the most difficult thing to model - humans and millions of them at that.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dict...tific%20method
: principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses

So I see the recognition and formulation of a problem and data collection through observation but it is clearly missing the experimentation part, which you concede (and I reject that the other sciences don't experiment - they absolutely do). And what hypotheses are being formulated and how are they being tested? They can't because there is only observational data to draw from - you can't go back in time to change things, I doubt you can even normalize for different periods in time or different economies since there is so much to depend on. So I'm having a hard time seeing that economics is anything more than social studies with hard math. That is not to diminish it, it's still a valid intellectual discipline, but with results that people find generally hard to trust or accept.

This is, quite literally, the point I was making. Your argument is: "We shouldn't rely on trained experts in the field and their peer reviewed research, we need to accept the positions of politicians."

Who are equally trained experts in their own field: of making decisions that affect human lives. And who certainly take economic recommendation but from different political perspectives as well as from other aspects of the decision making process.

So, you agree with the President's decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord then, right? Afterall, it was made based on "input from many sources" since it was a political decision.

I don't agree with it because I believe that PCA is a good step towards a healthier planet. I also don't agree because I don't believe the President's decision was based on the merits of the case at all but as a first public strike against 'globalism'. It was wholly a political decision, assuming that he even thought about it, that ignored both the science AND the global politics.

Context is important Sharmak. I was responding in that section to your attempt to include the justifications made by politicans (an appeal to authority fallacy), rather than economic triggering conditions. This thread is about the net results inflicted upon the economically vulnerable by minimum wage policies. If you want to compare it to a counterfactual with relevant economic points, sure, that is fine. But including unrelated political machinations by political parties isn't germane because they don't have a direct effect on the living conditions of the people in question.

What rubbish. Saying that politicians shouldn't be political is ridiculous - it's in their job title. It is absolutely germane because there is something to be said when in nearly every situation the economics around MW is wholly ignored! You're literally arguing that homeopathy works because you say so and that anyone that disagree isn't doing real science and those that implement the opposite are just doing it for 'political' purposes.

And of course their policies have a direct effect on the living conditions of the people in question: it is why MW is implemented in the first place versus doing nothing! Even if the effects are initially negative, they probably imagine that there will be further studies to try and mitigate their effect so even if the results are not in dispute, MW is merely a first step towards making companies pay a fair wage.

It means that the effects noted are a better situation that before enacting the policies.

Please support or retract that the existence of a government policy or program can only have net postive benefits.

Your own evidence showed that there were at least some people that did better than before.

Firstly, the conditions before such policy decisions are made. Secondly, the conditions of the state of affairs if MW wasn't implemented.

Those are literally the same thing you realize, right?

Ok, what are those conditions?

Not necessarily:

1. The first scenario is considering if we didn't raise MW and left things as they were with non-living wages.
2. The second scenario is considering what would have happened if there were no MW at all, i.e. going back to before MW was raised.

What happens then?

To follow the analogy;

Squatch: I'm saying that the consensus of 90% of doctors and 85% of peer reviewed medical papers is that the surgery you are suggesting will make the cancer worse.

Sharmak: You aren't considering the input from the insurance companies, or the Hospital Administrators!

Sure, I'm not considering their input, because they are making judgements based on factors other than whether or not the treament will help the cancer make it worse.

Well, no, according to the data Sharmak. What you are adding with the governments discussion is the idea that there are other considerations than whether the cancer gets worse or not. I'm asking you, what are those considerations?

Those considerations are basically to leave things as they are with companies paying a non-living wage that has to be supplemented by the taxpayer. It's an absolutely obvious step to make companies pay a fair living wage for a full working week. How the companies react initially can be mitigated - how about not letting them fire anyone or reduce their hours or otherwise try and cheat the system?

So you are conceding that policy making uses other factors than just the net impact to those concerned its its process? I agree. My point is that those considerations are relatively irrelevant to the question here, which is, are their lives improved? Are they less employed? Are they subject to more intergenerational poverty? Do they have less take home pay?

I'm conceding that doing something, seeing what happens and doing something else is better than your overall suggestion that nothing is done. Your only point is that companies are observed to do things that may be unexpected or unwanted and all that means is that other legislation needs to tighten up the loopholes.

The problem with your blind acceptance to the 'science' means that nothing can be done to mitigate the problems and that is wholly incorrect. Your overall conclusion merely means that we need better MW laws, not no MW legislation.

Ok, if you don't have any mitigations to offer, why did you bring them into the thread? Given that, we can agree that you are conceding point three of your objections since even you don't claim there are relevant mitigation techniques not being considered here.

I'm not really sure if I've conceded anything yet - my points have been and will always remain:

1. Your results are nearly universally ignored.
2. Your results are at best observations that could be used to provide stronger MW laws with fewer loopholes.
3. I doubt that your results are universally applicable, a point that you appear to pointedly ignore: another strike that economics is really a 'science', at least in this specific case.

Sharmak...did you even read the table?

To be honest no - it's armchair hypotheticals that could be legislated into another outcome. It's not even important to the discussion at hand, you're just reiterating the doomsday scenario, that you haven't shown would occur with every economy in the entire history of the world.

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by SharmaK

Sure but the problem I see is that if we don't increase MW nor implement MW then what? Well, we'd be back where we started and wages will remain stagnant and either people will remain poor or the taxpayers will have to supplement companies.

Well the first thing is to determine if the prescriptive treatment (in this case the Minimum Wage) causes more harm than it alleviates. For example, medical researchers didn't wait until there were other treatment options before saying "homeopathy doesn't work." They simply looked at the evidence from its usage and determined it didn't work. The effectiveness of other treatments was irrelevant to the question of whether it worked or not.

Just as with the rejection of homeopathy, when asking whether MW works, we need to look at what the experts are saying about its results. I think what you are appealing to here is the idea that, absent the MW, things would be worse, right? But that is the whole point of this thread, it isn't. Absent the minimum wage employment, mobility, poverty, and corporate welfare are actually better. We have to reject this economic homeopathy and look at alternatives that have evidence in support of them.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Politicians will sometimes act for what is best for the company and usually only when it benefits them politically.

I'm presuming you mean country. So we agree that politicians have other concerns besides what is good for the country in mind when they insitute policies. That means that their "expertise" on the effects of MW are suspect since they are obviously, as you said, focused on what benefits them politically.

Given that, we should stick to the hard data on the impact on people caused by the minimum wage.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Well, my high school 'understanding' of science is matched by your high school economics 101...nearly all the other sciences do actually have experiments.

Actually, my economics training was at the graduate school level at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington, but setting that aside. You claim here that "nearly all other sciences do actually have experiments..."

That leads to two questions.

1) the ones that don't are, presumably, still sciences in your mind? Which ones are those and why are they still sciences since they seem to fail to meet your definition?

Is it 100% guaranteed around the entire world and all possible economies and situations that MW will generally fail?

Nor is it claimed that it will worsen the economic condition of its intended beneficiaries in 100% of scenarios. There is 1 applicable notable exception in literature, the presence of monopsony power amongst the affected workers. Since we can discard that situation as not applying outside of, maybe, indonesia, we can say that it is relevant and all labor markets which don't have monopsony power.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

I'm not convinced that being adopted by a funding agency really makes it a science.

So in Sharmak's mind, the National Academy of Sciences and National Science Foundation are wrong?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

As far as the Nobel Institute, Wikipedia has the following to say:

An interesting paragraph about the internal politics of the Institute. You'll note that none of those criticisms were that economics isn't a science right? Which would make you introducing this a red herring.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

And there are plenty of other articles that claim that economics isn't really a science.

So..let me get this straight. You are citing an opinion piece written in a student newspaper by a sophmore with a grand total of 3 articles? That is you definitive evidence?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

So I see the recognition and formulation of a problem and data collection through observation but it is clearly missing the experimentation part,

Then you would also agree that climate sciences are not sciences right? After all, they aren't conducting experiments, they are generating models.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Who are equally trained experts in their own field: of making decisions that affect human lives.

Based on, as you noted, political ramifications. I absolutely agree with you that we should follow that line of thinking if the question were about the political impact of the minimum wage, or its political popularity, or its effect on the electorate. But it isn't. The question germane to this thread is about the financial and economic impact of the minimum wage. It is certainly an interesting question to ask why politicians support a policy we know has a negative economic impact, it just isn't very relevant here.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

I don't agree with it because I believe that PCA is a good step towards a healthier planet. I also don't agree because I don't believe the President's decision was based on the merits of the case at all but as a first public strike against 'globalism'. It was wholly a political decision, assuming that he even thought about it, that ignored both the science AND the global politics.

Ahh, so a politician acted at variance to what "science" was telling him then? I'm sure he was just considering the "broader picture" then, right? So we should accept his determination with regards to climate science then, as you would do here.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Saying that politicians shouldn't be political is ridiculous - it's in their job title. It is absolutely germane because there is something to be said when in nearly every situation the economics around MW is wholly ignored! You're literally arguing that homeopathy works because you say so and that anyone that disagree isn't doing real science and those that implement the opposite are just doing it for 'political' purposes.

You have the positions reversed in your analogy. I'm arguing that we limit our field of considerations to the trained experts (economists or doctors). You've said that we need to include those with a broader viewpoint (politicians or presumabely spritualists).

You are absolutely right that politicians are political, which is why their actions reflect on the political landscape, not the economic one. We can absolutely ask why politicians ignore the science of minimum wage or climate change, it is an interesting question. But step 1 of that discussion is the agreement about what the science of economics or climate change actually is.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Your own evidence showed that there were at least some people that did better than before.

Some people doing better is not the same thing as the group on net doing better. If I take a group of 4 people and shoot three of them, then give the 4th a million dollars, some people did better, but the group, on net did not.

Your claim was that the existence of a government policy or program can only have net postive benefits. IE that the group does better. Please support or retract that statement.

Simply asserting it isn't really an argument. If we continue the analogy, you are the one pushing homeopathy. We both agree that homeopathy is rejected by experts in the medical field. It is only accepted if we expand our list of people to consult to non-medical experts. If we include considerations that are not, strictly, medical.

That is your argument here, not mine. I'm arguing that we should limit ourselves to the experts in the field rather than expand our field of review to non-experts in economics.

Do trained experts in the relevant field (medicine) accept homeopathy: No.
Do trained experts in the relevant field (economics) accept minimum wage: No.

It seems regardless of which approach we take, the acceptance of homeopathy argument is far closer to what you are pushing than what I've argued.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

Those considerations are basically to leave things as they are with companies paying a non-living wage that has to be supplemented by the taxpayer. It's an absolutely obvious step to make companies pay a fair living wage for a full working week. How the companies react initially can be mitigated - how about not letting them fire anyone or reduce their hours or otherwise try and cheat the system?

And those are economic considerations. Let's take them in turn:

1) We know that, given the data, that the total cost to the taxpayer increases under minimum wage. Thus, by this consideration we should not have a minimum wage.

2) Let's presume we pass a law to prevent any labor changes following minimum wage increases. From the data we see that, even without those laws, a significant number of companies go out of business. This would only exacerbate that trend. If we force companies to bear a higher labor cost, a higher percentage will no longer be profitable and will hae to declare bankruptcy. Setting aside that such a law is patently unconsitutional, it would have much higher unemployment impacts than minimum wage with no such law. Rather than a reduction in hours and/or number of MW employees, all employees at the company would see their wages drop to $0. This would negatively impact a much larger group than just minimum wage employees as well as it would also effect managers, HR staff, etc.

We can reject idea 2 with a simple question. Where does the money to pay the higher labor costs come from in your mind Sharmak?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

I'm conceding that doing something, seeing what happens and doing something else is better than your overall suggestion that nothing is done.

You are claiming that. You've offered no evidence to support that assertion. We know that "doing something" when it comes to minimum wage isn't at all better, but rather worse. Do you have evidence that your proposal of "doing something and then doing something else" is better for peoples' lives as you claim?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

The problem with your blind acceptance to the 'science' means that nothing can be done to mitigate the problems and that is wholly incorrect.

Where have I claimed that "nothing" can be done? Please be specific. I've claimed that MW is not the answer, sure, but you are making a much broader statement, that I've said "nothing can be done." Can you support that I've made that statement?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

To be honest no - it's armchair hypotheticals that could be legislated into another outcome.

No, its math based on established data from real world observations. It is pretty bold to admit that you aren't approaching this thread with intellectual honesty. You asked me a specific question about the table then admitted you hadn't even looked at it. That is incredibly intellectually dishonest and I would personally say even borders on trolling. If you aren't going to intellectually engage in the debate, why are you here?

"Suffering lies not with inequality, but with dependence." -Voltaire

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” -G.K. Chesterton

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

I'm not really sure where to go from here since I think we're just going around in circles. At the root of your problems is your lack of evidence that your results apply on a global scale with all economies in all of history. It makes economics more akin to social studies, a discipline that is mostly observation with a bit of math.

I still maintain that the MW problems you raise can be dealt with and that more studies are needed. That you still have no real reasons as to employer's specific responses (after several decades) tells me that your results are politically motivated and not really a 'science'. It's astonishing that you have no answers as to why an employer would choose to harm its employees are than take less profit; you'd think that being a real science there'd be some studies done. So you're either not telling the full story or the studies you present are biased towards to support a specific political outcome.

Until you have something better than a few observations, I think, along with nearly all of the rest of the world's governments, the points you raise here just have to be ignored as being insufficient evidence to discontinue using MW. Perhaps in a few years time there you'll have something a little more solid.

PS: I've been ignoring your table because it add no additional value to the discussion: it just reflects what you've been saying all along and does nothing to forward the discussion.

Edit: I also have to say that I don't doubt your results, what I doubt is that the discussion ends there and that we should never use MW again.

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

I also have to point out again, that if your recommendation is to repeal all MW laws and never to institute it again, (and forbid all unions and other collective bargaining institutions) then we’re back to the original problem that these ideas are trying to resolve: low wages.

It appears that you’re saying that this is the best situation possible but you haven’t proven it to be the case. And unless you have better ideas I think MW is still the best first step.

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

At the root of your problems is your lack of evidence that your results apply on a global scale with all economies in all of history.

I have shown that this data works for all labor markets that do not have a substantial monopsony effect. That includes all labor markets in all locations at all points in time where monopsony isn't present.

If you're arguing that we should have MW laws in professional sports (where there is monopsony power) we can happily discuss that, I would concede that MW laws in professional sports might actually increase employment and income. If you are saying that this data applies to literally any other market in history that doesn't have significant monopsony power, then you are arguing against both consensus and data.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

I still maintain that the MW problems you raise can be dealt with

Ok, then how, with what policies/activities? What support do you have they will work?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

That you still have no real reasons as to employer's specific responses

Because you haven't read the thread. I've offered the explanatory mechanism on several occassions and offered the supporting data. You, incorrectly, create a false choice where companies just have to "take less profit." Given that the average profit margin in the US is someting like 1-2%, and even lower for heavy MW employers, a cost increase to a company's single largest expense category (labor) of 10-15% isn't a matter of just taking less profit, it is a question of bankruptcy. That's why, as shown, a large number of employers either cease operating, cease MW heavy operations, or move jurisdictions.

Where, in your mind, do you fund the additional 10-15% labor costs from?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

I also have to point out again, that if your recommendation is to repeal all MW laws and never to institute it again, (and forbid all unions and other collective bargaining institutions) then we’re back to the original problem that these ideas are trying to resolve: low wages.

I don't disagree with this at all. Hence why I haven't said that if we repeal MW laws things will be all rainbows and lollipops. What I said was that, given the net negatives MW introduces to the most vulnerable in our society, repealing those laws would be a better situation than the one we have now.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

It appears that you’re saying that this is the best situation possible but you haven’t proven it to be the case.

Where have I said that simply repealing MW laws is the optimal solution? Please by specific, you've been asked to support this on several occassions. It's important because you are using it to ignore the actual main thrust of the argument and to obfuscate my actual position.

"Suffering lies not with inequality, but with dependence." -Voltaire

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” -G.K. Chesterton

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Squatch347

I have shown that this data works for all labor markets that do not have a substantial monopsony effect. That includes all labor markets in all locations at all points in time where monopsony isn't present.

If you're arguing that we should have MW laws in professional sports (where there is monopsony power) we can happily discuss that, I would concede that MW laws in professional sports might actually increase employment and income. If you are saying that this data applies to literally any other market in history that doesn't have significant monopsony power, then you are arguing against both consensus and data.

This is largely irrelevant and not the point being discussed since the point is still that doing nothing will not increases wages.

Ok, then how, with what policies/activities? What support do you have they will work?

I’ve already suggested that more studies be done on the employers and why they make the decisions they do. Perhaps they’re just doing it out of spite to make sure the government doesn’t take more money. Who knows?

Because you haven't read the thread. I've offered the explanatory mechanism on several occassions and offered the supporting data. You, incorrectly, create a false choice where companies just have to "take less profit." Given that the average profit margin in the US is someting like 1-2%, and even lower for heavy MW employers, a cost increase to a company's single largest expense category (labor) of 10-15% isn't a matter of just taking less profit, it is a question of bankruptcy. That's why, as shown, a large number of employers either cease operating, cease MW heavy operations, or move jurisdictions.

I have answered this point: if a company is so dependent on cheap labor then it shouldn’t exist! It literally means that the government and the taxpayer are propping up the company and if we’re doing that anyway then we should be the ones dictating the pay. Perhaps the we can give them tax breaks or something.

Where, in your mind, do you fund the additional 10-15% labor costs from?

You don’t. Just like using child or slave labor is a terrible thing that should be shut down, so should businesses that force workers to work long hours without paying them a proper living wage. That’s my consistent answer all along and hopefully, other companies will kick in and redress the balance and find a way to both pay staff a living wage and make a profit.

I don't disagree with this at all. Hence why I haven't said that if we repeal MW laws things will be all rainbows and lollipops. What I said was that, given the net negatives MW introduces to the most vulnerable in our society, repealing those laws would be a better situation than the one we have now.

The most vulnerable are honestly not that important in this argument though: they already have a great safety net and if they want to do better then they need to up their skills. Automation and computerization has decimated traditional manual work so everyone must retool.

Those that will be left will be those companies that have figured out how to do business without taking advantage of their own workers and the taxpayer.

Where have I said that simply repealing MW laws is the optimal solution? Please by specific, you've been asked to support this on several occassions. It's important because you are using it to ignore the actual main thrust of the argument and to obfuscate my actual position.

You’ve argued against introducing it, you’ve argued against raising it and you’ve argued against unions and collective bargaining. I can’t go through the whole thread again so if you don’t support those positions then it will be simpler if you said so.

Re: Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

This is largely irrelevant and not the point being discussed since the point is still that doing nothing will not increases wages.

Really? Your last post said:

At the root of your problems is your lack of evidence that your results apply on a global scale with all economies in all of history.

So it can both be the "root" problem and not relevant?

Come one Sharmak, at least have the intellectual courage to admit that your point was incorrect.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

I’ve already suggested that more studies be done on the employers and why they make the decisions they do

Two glaring problems with this response.

1) You said: "I still maintain that the MW problems you raise can be dealt with" not, I'm not sure why they are happening. You definitively said they can be dealt with. Fine, how?

2) The studies already exist and are linked in this thread. The major driving forces are basic math. You can't push a company's expenses above its revenue.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

if a company is so dependent on cheap labor then it shouldn’t exist!

You haven't answered that point, you just maintained the above with no defense or reasoning. You've offered no justification as to why they "shouldn't exist." What moral or economic argument are you offering to support that justification? And, how does that argument relate to my point that this is why unemployment happens when you impose an artificial wage floor.

The closest I've seen that could be inferred is that they impost costs on taxpayers. Ok, but given that shutting those companies down or causing them to go out of business only increases costs on tax payers, how is this a good policy?

Originally Posted by Sharmak

You don’t.

It is an odd moral answer to say that you are fine with lower minority employment, higher multi-generational poverty, lower quality of life, and higher taxpayer burden, but it is an answer I guess.

Originally Posted by Sharmak

The most vulnerable are honestly not that important in this argument though

Same as above. If you are absolutely fine with increasing the burden on that social safety net (no explanation of where the additional funding will come from), and creating multi-generational poverty as shown in the data, ok. Just seems like an odd position to hold, especially if you are trying to maintain that you are actually trying to help those who are economi

Originally Posted by Sharmak

You’ve argued against introducing it, you’ve argued against raising it and you’ve argued against unions and collective bargaining.

Ok, those are essentially two positions. How do you rationalize that that means I think it is an optimal solution?

Sharmak, you are against the traditional Sodomy Laws in this country because they harm homosexuals, you must think then that the optimal solution includes child rape (which were covered under many of those laws) right? See how silly your argument's structure is?

Because I am against policy 1 and policy 2 does not mean there are not any policies, anywhere that would address the underlying problems.

Unless you can offer support that I've said that repealing a minimum wage creates an optimal solution or that I've said there are no other possible policies (both unsupported claims you've made) those claims are retracted, please don't make them again.

"Suffering lies not with inequality, but with dependence." -Voltaire

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” -G.K. Chesterton

Increasing the Minimum Wage hurts those most vulnerable in our society.

Originally Posted by Squatch347

Really? Your last post said:

At the root of your problems is your lack of evidence that your results apply on a global scale with all economies in all of history.

So it can both be the "root" problem and not relevant?

Come one Sharmak, at least have the intellectual courage to admit that your point was incorrect.

I’ve admitted I’m wrong before. That’s the point of the discussion. That you don’t see it often is that in this debate you haven’t been persuasive: making grand sweeping statements that you’re only now trimming down the scope of.

My original point was about the scope of what you have been saying, which you now restrict to those scenarios where there is a low affect of monopsony. That’s what makes it now more irrelevant.

Two glaring problems with this response.

1) You said: "I still maintain that the MW problems you raise can be dealt with" not, I'm not sure why they are happening. You definitively said they can be dealt with. Fine, how?

2) The studies already exist and are linked in this thread. The major driving forces are basic math. You can't push a company's expenses above its revenue.

First step is to initiate more studies. You’re the one claiming economics is a science so where are your follow up studies regarding motivations. That you haven’t presented any past the initial satisfaction of your politician goals speaks volumes.

And if it’s basic math then good riddance!

You haven't answered that point, you just maintained the above with no defense or reasoning. You've offered no justification as to why they "shouldn't exist." What moral or economic argument are you offering to support that justification? And, how does that argument relate to my point that this is why unemployment happens when you impose an artificial wage floor.

Also, now you’re talking about the company’s revenue as a factor. Which restricts and shrinks your scenarios further: MW is now only a problem if somehow the cost of implementing is exceeds the company’s profits. Are you claiming now that MW affects all companies because all companies don’t make enough profit? Or will you now honestly qualify your statement?

The argument is simple economics: a company that cannot make a profit shouldn’t exist. If a company exists by paying people poorly and being paid by the taxpayer and whatever incentives the government gives it then I don’t see anything immoral about it folding. Isn’t that what the free market is supposed to be about?

And also, specifically what companies are you talking about? The odd mom and pop shop that you mention hardly counts.

The closest I've seen that could be inferred is that they impost costs on taxpayers. Ok, but given that shutting those companies down or causing them to go out of business only increases costs on tax payers, how is this a good policy?

Sure. Bad industries need to be wiped out and not artificially propped up by the government. That again, is the free market at work. People will get other jobs or be forced to retrain. It’s happened before and will happen again.

It is an odd moral answer to say that you are fine with lower minority employment, higher multi-generational poverty, lower quality of life, and higher taxpayer burden, but it is an answer I guess.

Well, if you’re saying that these jobs are another form of government handout then you’re also conceding that a wholly free market is a terrible idea. So you can’t on the one hand argue against government interference in setting MW to whatever it seems appropriate and then on the other hand complain when it does so. Make up your mind.

Ok, those are essentially two positions. How do you rationalize that that means I think it is an optimal solution?

Sharmak, you are against the traditional Sodomy Laws in this country because they harm homosexuals, you must think then that the optimal solution includes child rape (which were covered under many of those laws) right? See how silly your argument's structure is?

Because I am against policy 1 and policy 2 does not mean there are not any policies, anywhere that would address the underlying problems.

Unless you can offer support that I've said that repealing a minimum wage creates an optimal solution or that I've said there are no other possible policies (both unsupported claims you've made) those claims are retracted, please don't make them again.

Then it’s up to you to be specific in what you’re arguing. I’ve already forced you to concede to be more precise. So if you’re OK with MW and collective bargaining and unions then I’m OK too. But you have argued against them.